Mac utilities help
 

Am running OS 10.4 on an older Powerbook G4 and am having trouble with it running very slowly and getting glitchy. Can anyone suggest a utilities for maintenance/cleaning etc (free would be great of course)? I use Glarysoft's on my PC at home but they are only PC. Not as familiar with the Mac options.

1. Do you have enough RAM (at least 1GB)?
2. Have you run Disk Utility lately and fixed your permissions?
3. If you're having trouble with a web browser, have you cleared your cache/cookies recently? Some people don't do this for years and get hundreds of megs of temp files.
4. Do you have any programs that run in the background or have a component that runs in the background? Have you tried disabling or updating them to see if that helps things?

Maintenance programs are a pretty big waste of money. Especially on a Mac.

Not sure how to find Disk Utility. Have looked for something like that and don't see where it is. Also not sure how to look for programs running in the background. (Not as computer dense as I sound but have gotten much more familiar with PC's over the years of not using a mac much and now finding I don't remember how to troubleshoot. Hence the wish for some utility to do this!)

Spotlight is your friend. Hold down the Apple and Spacebar keys to quickly bring up the search box and you can find anything on your system. However, if you want to make your life a little harder disk utility is located in Applications/Utilities. There you will also find Activity Monitor which will bring up a list of active programs, much like the Windows task manger.

Mac help (system bar at the top of the screen, pulldown from help>mac help) will tell you step by step how to get to your disk utility and do a verify/repair of permissions.

Applications->Utilities

Once you find it, here's what to do: http://kb.wisc.edu/helpdesk/page.php?id=3810#permission

If you bought an AppleCare warranty with your Mac, it probably came with a disk that includes a utility called TechTool. I'm not sure exactly what TechTool does on OS X (I used to use it on OS 9 to reset the PRAM and other fun stuff and haven't really played with it on OS X), but it might be worth popping in that disk and pushing all the buttons to see what happens.

Thanks all. Found everything. Appreciate the help.

Onyx is also a good program for cleaning up your Mac.