DJMark
8:32 AM - 10 December, 2010
I agree that you really don't *have* to do any real tweaking to use a Mac, but this is what I personally do...very fresh in my mind, since I spent part of the evening setting up an "emergency" OS partition on my new media drive:
1) I do a "custom" reinstall of the OS from the discs included with the Mac, leaving out all the printer drivers and extra languages. Just doing that saves 5-6gb of space.
2) I clear out everything in the Dock, except for System Preferences and the Applications, Documents and Downloads Folders. I add the "Utilities" folder next to Documents. I then set all 4 of the Dock folders to display as folders, view content as Lists (do that by right/two-finger-clicking on the folder icons in the Dock). Then I go to System Preferences/Dock, turn on "Automatically hide and show Dock", and crank up the Dock size slider.
2) Still in System Preferences, I go to Energy Saver and turn off the "Automatic Graphics Switching" (to make the computer always use the dedicated GPU). I also turn all the "sleep" options off there, and set everything the same for "battery" (that way, if the power connector gets accidentally unplugged at a gig, something unexpected won't happen with the performance of the computer when it's running off the battery).
3) still in System Preferences, in CD's and DVD's I set everything to "Ignore". (Yes the drive will still work fine, you'll just have to manually decide what to do when inserting a disc).
4) in System Preferences/Security, either disable the infrared reciever completely, or pair it with your choice of remote if you have one. Otherwise *any* Apple remote will be able to put your computer to sleep or do other stuff that you might find annoying.
5) in System Preferences/Desktop & Screen Saver, I set the screen saver to "never".
6) in System Preferences/Bluetooth, I shut off the Bluetooth radio and take the bluetooth status icon out of the Menu Bar.
7) (this is just personal preference) I go to System Preferences/Appearance, and Set "Appearance" to "Graphite".
8) this is the one thing that involves any system-level change: I go to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons, and remove the three items "com.apple.periodic-daily.plist", "com.apple.periodic-weekly.plist", and "com.apple.periodic-monthly.plist". You may want to save those to a logically-named folder in case you change your mind. That prevents the three Unix maintenance scripts from running themselves in the middle of a DJ set, something that may well happen since they're set to run in the wee hours of the morning. You can then use a third-party tool like Onyx or Cocktail to manually run those scripts.
I definitely agree that SMCFanControl is very valuable to have. Both to monitor CPU temperature and to crank up the fans when playing video for hours in a hot room.
I personally use Cocktail, Onyx, Diskwarrior, SMARTUtility and iDefrag for various maintenance functions. iDefrag is the one I use the least.
