I think by housekeeping he means:
-doing a repair on disk permissions in Disk Utility
-Clearing out all system and browser cache files
-running the "daily, weekly, and monthly" unix maintainance thingi-majigers...
Mac Janitor is very good at doing the daily, weekly, and monthly runs.
As for clearing the cache, once my bro gets back with my laptop I can find the name of the app I usually use that basically is a program with packaged scripts for cleaning the comp. Unless someone else can recommend an app.
I noticed that Safari ran a bit slower after 10.4.3, but after I did these three things it ran noticeably faster.