Mac Slowdown - Cocktail to the rescue

I've had my Mac Mini for three years now. And during that time it got slower and slower. It got to the point where every time I clicked on Safari or itunes, I could grab a cup of coffee before the program loaded. I was considering upgrading to a newer Intel based Mac it was running so slow. We mainly use the Mac as a surfing box in the kitchen. We also use it as our main iTunes database and serve music to the house from it using a Apple Airport extreme.

I've been a PC guy for years and know about deleting the caches and defraging to keep a computer running cleanly. There on tons of utilities for the PC to keep it running clean. For the PC i like CCleaner (www.ccleaner.com). Theres are not as many choices for the Mac.

First of all on a Mac there is no reason to defrag the hard drive. From what I read it has to do with the way the OS handles files.

As for speeding up my slow Mac, I found a great utility called Cocktail. It's about $15 and worth every penny. Cocktail clear out a whole slew of caches (system caches, component caches, kernel caches, user caches, ColorSync caches, Dock caches, Java caches, QuickTime caches and font caches) that I never knew my Mac had.

Using a feature in Cocktail called Pilot, I scheduled Cocktail to clear all my caches and restart my PC every Tuesday morning at 6:00am. I also had to go into my system preferences and make sure to wake my computer prior to 6:00am so that the scheduler could run. I've found doing this keeps it clean and running fast all of the time. So it looks like i can put off my mac upgrade for a little while.