My Mac Fixes

We are told that IPv6 -- an updated and advanced system of network addressing -- is the future of the Internet. That may be true, but IPv6 is also an immature and treacherous technology. For maximum reliability, my wife and I have two Internet connections, one cable and one DSL. Both are routed through wireless networks running on Apple's latest generation of AirPort base station. Generally, I use the cable Internet, while my wife uses the DSL, though we switch as needed. For the past few months, my wife has switched to the cable more often than intended. With her DSL, she kept complaining that Web pages were slow to load or stopped partway. I tried a number of possible solutions and managed to make some improvements in network operation, but nothing fixed the original problem. And then she complained it was getting worse. I began to wonder if our old DSL modem was at fault. So, I started researching modems and uncovered some interesting facts. One was that our DSL provider,

I'm not sure I can tell you exactly why they're so slow, but I think I can tell you how to fix them. Time Machine backups on my Mac Pro with Snow Leopard normally take just a few minutes at most. But recently, I found them taking about 15 minutes each. Reading the status messages in the Time Machine preference pane, I saw that over a million items were being scanned during each backup -- twice. And the actual copying took place at a snail's pace, sometimes a few kilobytes at a time, even though I was hearing a wild disk chattering for most of the backup. Googling around, I discovered that Time Machine relies on a database called .fseventsd to tell it what files need backing up. When it can't read that database, is does the "deep scan" I was seeing reported in the status messages. But it should only have to do that once to get that database back on track. So, something else was obviously getting in the way. I finally found one lone voice saying he had fix