A free system maintenance and cleaning utility for Intel Mac OS X 10.6 or later is brought to our attention by John Carter. He asks, "Does it take a long time to launch an application? Tired of waiting for 20 seconds or more for iPhoto to come up? Would 4 seconds be better? Is Mail launching almost instantly?
"You can vastly improve the performance of your Mac by running a third party application called Maintenance. If it doesn't automatically install in Applications > Utilities, I suggest moving it there."
John suggests, "When you run Maintenance, I recommend selecting all the options at least the first time. Otherwise, the defaults are probably good enough unless you don’t see a major improvement in the time to launch your favorite application.
"Be aware that after running Maintenance, the first time you launch any application it will take much longer. Also, if you use Spotlight to find and launch an application it won’t be found the first time you attempt to find an application after running Maintenance, so you have to launch the application from Finder the first time. In addition, it will take longer the first time you are able to launch an application from Spotlight after running Maintenance, but subsequent launches are much quicker.
"To confirm that running Maintenance actually improves the launch time, I opened Gimp before running Maintenance. The time was 22 seconds. Then I ran Maintenance. The first time I opened Gimp it took 28 seconds. I closed Gimp and X11 (which is required for Gimp) and reopened Gimp. It took 8 seconds. A similar performance improvement was noticed with iPhoto and NeoOffice. Mail now launches almost instantly (after the first time)."
John concludes, "Actually, Maintenance is provided by the same developer that provides Onyx, a similar, free application. And the download page for Titanium shows different versions of the apps for different versions of Mac. (I've got to look deeper into Deeper. Pun Intended) I have used Onyx, but never got the performance improvement from it like I did by using Maintenance. Each application has its own benefits and has different features."