Posted by Lindsey Wilkerson (10.128.11.165) on December 01, 2004 at 10:21:12:
After spending a frustrating several days last week working in the Chacahoula and Pow Wow offices working on all of their new G5 Macs suffering from slow or non-existent application launches, I found a relatively quick fix that solved a myriad of minor glitches and gremlins.
Run the “Repair Disk Permissions” function in the Disk Utility application (Applications à Utilities à Disk Utility). It seems that as programs and updates are installed, the UNIX permissions tend to get corrupt. Running this utility solved most of my problems and the Macs, once again, seemed pretty zippy (by God they should with the G5 processor and 2 GB RAM!). Even hardcore Mac mavens will run this utility after any install or update.
Thanks to David Pogue’s “Mac OS X – Panther Edition: The Missing Manual – The book that should have been in the box” for this tip.
I’ve also added this tip to my Mac Help web page - http://www.ulm.edu/~lwilkerson/tips.html#mactips