I used to be able to optimise Mac OS to within an inch of it's life, but I've forgotten most of what I knew already.

I know the feeling, I used to manage 200+ Macs, but can't remember many of the old tricks at all.

Generally, Macs don't get slower and more crash-prone over time like Windows has a tendency to do - there is a lot less going on behind the scenes and most optimisations can be performed by carrying out some pruning in the system folder.

I beg to differ, unless things changed dramatically with MacOS 9. When I was managing those Macs we were still on the last iteration of MacOS 8 and the Macs used to "decay" at a very similar rate to the PCs running Win95 and WinNT4.

On the PCs you could run tools to clean up the registry which would normally delay a complete reinstall by another six months. On the Mac, because any configuration data was generally hidden away in a binary file, there was little you could do to extend the OS install's live beyond shuffling the contents of the system folder around.

Comparing those MacOS 8.x machines and Win2k would be no competition, Win2k suffers far less from OS decay. I doubt if all the problem were fixed in MacOS 9 either, as they aren't the sort of problems you can just "tweak" out of software, a full redesign and re-write is needed to address them.

We brings me to MacOS X, which although I haven't used it, I am sure it suffers from few of these problems. I also hear that it's config data is in plain text file (or XML at least) ?