A couple of weeks ago, I was surfing the Mac sites and came upon www.osxfaq.com and saw their section on "Dump Terminal Tricks" Below that section was another section that just gave random CLI commands to do various task. One of them was to "Speed up performance on older machines". I thought I would give it a try. When I ran the command
sudo update_prebinding -root /I received a message stating something like "DVD Player.pkg" wasn't working properly and it was going to attempt to fix the issue. It said that the problem was then fixed. I didn't really think anything of it, plus it was about four in the morning, so I was ready to go to bed. When I came home from work that night, I remembered the message I received the night before, and I thought, what the heck, I'll try putting in a disk and see what happens. I put my Braveheart DVD in, and voila, the disk loaded and DVD Player started up. I pressed play and there it was, my DVD drive worked, no replacement parts, just a single line of code.
[Editor's note: The "update prebinding" command's primary purpose is not to speed up older machines. "Update prebinding" has been mentioned here before, and its primary job is to attach (or prebind) shared libraries to those applications which need them -- at least, that's my best non-techie understanding of the command! By prebinding these shared libraries, the applications load much faster than they did previously. This has benefits on all machines, but it has the biggest impact on older, slower machines. Update prebinding is also the last thing most Apple installers run, which is why they take so long to finish (it can take up to 10 or 15 minutes to prebind a large hard drive with a large number of applications).]

