Need recommendation for Norton Utilities for G4
Not Me
10.2 or classic.
We're way out in the boonies and cannot find a store with NU V8.0 for Mac in
stock and need desperately to pull maintenance (defrag) on my wife's new G4
lap top (don't ask -- it's my fault and 'yes dear' does not work <g>).
Any recommendations on a short term solution including trail software/demo
etc. that we might down load would be appreciated.
brother_rabbit @ hotmail.com
Joel Farris
> We have an older version of Norton (6.0?) that works on OS9 but not on OS
> 10.2 or classic.
>
> We're way out in the boonies and cannot find a store with NU V8.0 for Mac in
> stock and need desperately to pull maintenance (defrag) on my wife's new G4
> lap top (don't ask -- it's my fault and 'yes dear' does not work <g>).
I have been hearing from quite a number of sources that OS 10.2 or newer doesn't
need to be defraged. The understanding is that in OS 9, files would be written
at random, but in OS X, everything has a place and a journal is kept of every
location and what is written there. The journaled disk is much less suceptable
to fragmentation, so much more than OS 9 that, in fact, Defragging a journalled
volume can actually slow down read/write speeds. Can anybody else confirm this?
I have never defragmented any of my drives running 10.2 and 10.3, and even my
Pro Tools audio editing system has not slowed down due to disk read/write
speeds. I do know that as a disk gets close to full then files can become more
fragmented. The magic number I've heard is 90%. That is, if you have a 40GB
drive then you should try to keep at least 4GB free space.
--
Joel Farris
twinkledust Designs
http://twinkledust.com
AIM chat: FarrisJoel
Q: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
A: Why is top posting frowned upon?
Not Me
"Joel Farris"
|
| > We have an older version of Norton (6.0?) that works on OS9 but not on
OS
| > 10.2 or classic.
| >
| > We're way out in the boonies and cannot find a store with NU V8.0 for
Mac in
| > stock and need desperately to pull maintenance (defrag) on my wife's new
G4
| > lap top (don't ask -- it's my fault and 'yes dear' does not work <g>).
|
|
| I have been hearing from quite a number of sources that OS 10.2 or newer
doesn't
written
| at random, but in OS X, everything has a place and a journal is kept of
every
susceptible
| to fragmentation, so much more than OS 9 that, in fact, Defragging a
| volume can actually slow down read/write speeds. Can anybody else confirm
this?
|
| I have never defragmented any of my drives running 10.2 and 10.3, and even
my
| Pro Tools audio editing system has not slowed down due to disk read/write
| speeds. I do know that as a disk gets close to full then files can become
more
| fragmented. The magic number I've heard is 90%. That is, if you have a
40GB
| drive then you should try to keep at least 4GB free space.
Thanks for the response. someone has recommended TechToolPro V4.02
http://www.micromac.com/ as a better tool than Norton.
FWIW my wife spoke to someone (yea we all know the guy <g>) at Apple field
support and they recommend defragging but did say that they don't do defrag
at the local shop.
Someone also mentioned that Norton does not work (well?) with OS10.2+ I've
not been able to speak with anyone at Norton about this (or anything else)
so I cannot confirm the report.
Regardless I've ordered a copy of TechToolPro and will be getting a download
code within the hour so perhaps my problem will be going away. (they will be
sending the CD by UPS)
As to the load on her HDD it's a big drive 55GB+ and I doubt it is anywhere
near full as the system report 7.5GB used.
Thanks again for the response.
Carl Witthoft
Joel Farris <this....@valid.address> wrote:
> Not Me wrote:
>
> > We have an older version of Norton (6.0?) that works on OS9 but not on OS
> > 10.2 or classic.
> >
> > We're way out in the boonies and cannot find a store with NU V8.0 for Mac
> > in
> > stock and need desperately to pull maintenance (defrag) on my wife's new G4
> > lap top (don't ask -- it's my fault and 'yes dear' does not work <g>).
>
>
> I have been hearing from quite a number of sources that OS 10.2 or newer
> doesn't
> need to be defraged. The understanding is that in OS 9, files would be
> written
> at random, but in OS X, everything has a place and a journal is kept of every
> location and what is written there. The journaled disk is much less
> suceptable
> to fragmentation, so much more than OS 9 that, in fact, Defragging a
> journalled
> volume can actually slow down read/write speeds. Can anybody else confirm
> this?
>
BSD, like most *nixes, does its best to allocate files based on their
size (thus matching rogue bits of free disk to files), and has various
background processes which are supposed to do cleanup tasks now and
then. The drawback is that if you put your Mac to sleep or shutdown,
they may not happen.
Get "macaroni" (check out versiontracker), which will take care to run
these Unix maintenance tasks for you.
You might also want to read about fsck, see the Apple KB article at
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
And then there are a couple freeware apps that clean out all sorts of
system cache files. I don't know much about them.
Carl
Joe Blow
Carl Witthoft <ca...@witthoft.com> wrote:
> BSD, like most *nixes, does its best to allocate files based on their
> size (thus matching rogue bits of free disk to files), and has various
> background processes which are supposed to do cleanup tasks now and
> then. The drawback is that if you put your Mac to sleep or shutdown,
> they may not happen.
> Get "macaroni" (check out versiontracker), which will take care to run
> these Unix maintenance tasks for you.
>
> You might also want to read about fsck, see the Apple KB article at
> http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106214
>
> And then there are a couple freeware apps that clean out all sorts of
> system cache files. I don't know much about them.
>
> Carl
Journaling is not enabled by default in 10.2, so turn it on with Disk
Utility. Once journaling is enabled, you can forget about fsck and de-fragging.
Disk Warrior is a good utility to have, as it optimizes your disk's directory
files.
http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html
--
Joe