Optimizing a MacBook

[papo]

@DJ7Star

Thank you guys(gals) whats the caffeine app do?

@papo

Keeps the Mac display from going to sleep.

Or manually do it in the System Preferences under Energy Saver.

Yea, you can do that too.

I just like caffeine because it’s one click to enable, one click to disable. (Super light-weight app) It prevents you from having to go into System Prefs.. when you want to toggle on/off.

[mostapha]

Personally I never run into any performance issues while keeping 15-20% free. Anything that goes into a deck in a DJing software gets loaded into the RAM and keeping 50% free just to gain some ms worth of load time is IMO a big waste of money since the difference is negligible.

Agreed, though for a different reason. The work it takes to get passable performance out of spinning platters is ridiculous. Just get an SSD as soon as you can afford a good one. Unlike many upgrades, the difference is basically night & day.

@DJ7Star

I didn’t you could do all this to make it better! Can all this be done on a MacBook 2, 1 with an upgraded ram to 4gb and have that Mac run just my DJ software? Or is it smarter to use my more current MacBook Pro and add an SSD with 8 gb ram, have it run my DJ software and production software? I’m just scared that the older Mac wont be reliable but then again it would only be used for djing. On the other hand I’m worried that using the Mac Pro, wich I also need for ableton, and for school would be too risky to also use it to dj

A lot of it can be done on any Mac. I used to own that computer. It was the first one I put an SSD in, and it treated me well for several years. I used it for everything…dropped it…carried it just about daily…gigged with it.

It finally died when–several months after buying my current MBP–my girlfriend spilled a can of coke on it. She shut it off immediately and took it to a repair center that wasn’t an Apple store before she called me, and the moron who worked there turned it back on. If I’d gotten to it first, I probably could have saved it.

@papo

I just like caffeine because it’s one click to enable, one click to disable. (Super light-weight app) It prevents you from having to go into System Prefs.. when you want to toggle on/off.

I used to swear by Caffeine……until I realized that I never turned it off. After that, I just set an unused hot corner to start the screen saver and turned off all the power saving stuff (never sleep disks, never turn on screensaver, never sleep the screen, never sleep the laptop until it’s running on reserve battery). I haven’t had a problem.

Frankly, I don’t get why people have those options on. On Desktops, why would you turn it off (as opposed to locking it and shutting off the screen)? On Laptops, it’s easier to just shut the lid.

[DJ7Star]

Great feedback!!! RIP Macbook tho

[rZygi]

@mostapha

The work it takes to get passable performance out of spinning platters is ridiculous.

That’s what I meant. Too much logistics involved in HDDs.

[mostapha]

Files under 20mb gets defragged automatically.

Personally I never run into any performance issues while keeping 15-20% free. Anything that goes into a deck in a DJing software gets loaded into the RAM and keeping 50% free just to gain some ms worth of load time is IMO a big waste of money since the difference is negligible.

Also, I didn’t realize this at first, but you’re just talking about free space in the partition, not unpartitioned space.

That doesn’t do anything.

The way hard drives work, they don’t actually delete data until you need to write over that part of the disk, so even if you keep it 70% free, it’ll move data progressively farther towards the outside of the platter until you’ve written the entire capacity of the disk, then it’ll start re-writing from the unused space in the center. At least, that’s how they worked the last time I looked at them.

Defragging religiously helps, but if you actually want fast load times, you have to make one partition at about half the total capacity of the drive and leave the rest as unpartitioned space. And the less of each drive you use, the better the access/seek times.

When you start really thinking about it……and that all that you can do doesn’t meet the performance of an SSD, spinning platters seem even more archaic.

When you’re recording or doing production, it does help to have your recordings/samples on a separate drive from your system & apps (I mean drive…not partition)………but it doesn’t actually matter for DJ use. And especially if you’re dedicating a laptop to DJ stuff……if you can’t fit what you need on a few dozen to a hundred or so GB of flash storage, you really need to think about how you prepare for gigs.