System Maintenance Tips: AppleJack
Dan Frakes has a rather thorough article up over at MacFixIt, covering the basics of OS X maintenance and recommending the command line tool, AppleJack, as a viable troubleshooting tool. What makes it better than a lot of other tools out there is that it can be used when you cannot even get your machine to boot: "AppleJack is a user friendly troubleshooting assistant for Mac OS X. With AppleJack you can troubleshoot a computer even if you can't load the GUI, or don't have a startup CD handy. AppleJack runs in Single User Mode and is menu-based for ease of use."
Make sure you check out Frakes' full article for a more comprehensive discussion.
