OS X - Use Disk Utility to fix system issues

At times you may experience issues with OS X but you can't narrow down their causes.

Your OS X performs slower than usual, you have errors opening system utilities and experience anyway a poor performance.

This situation is not very common but, if so, before re-imaging the machine, it can come in handy to try verifying and repairing your disk and your disk permissions with Disk Utility.

Disk Utility, similarly to Windows Disk Management, allows to manage your disks and partitions and to fix any issues they can have.

You can create and delete partitions, erase a partition, etc.

In this case, we'll have to run Verify Disk.

  

If any errors are found, you'll have to select Repair Disk to fix them (in the above figures no errors were detected).

If these steps don't completely solve your problems, you may want to check disk permissions.

When you install OS X, system files come with specific read (r), write (w) and execute (x) permissions that are supposed to remain unaltered.

Sometimes, though, third-party software can impact on system files and libraries, unduly modifying indirectly their permissions .

In this case, you may want to run Verify Disk Permissions. 

If any error is found, running Repair Disk Permissions reverts system file permissions back to their original values.

This procedure allows to fix several system and performance problems but it must be used only when needed, as OS X doesn't require the same amount of tweaking as Windows.