>Ana, if I had a new-to-me 3400 with 48MB (I wish), the first thing I'd do is
>low level that sucker and pop OS 8.6 on there, and install Internet Explorer
>4.5 and Outlook Express 5.0 (in that order).
I'm always interested by the tendency of Mac users to reformat and
reinitialise hard drives whenever there's a problem, or in this case as a
prophylactic. For the record, there's no way to actually low-level format
an IDE drive like the one in the 3400 (or 2400, or 2300). All you'll be
doing is writing zeros to the disk, which isn't going to buy you much but a
sort of hospital sense of cleanliness and a way to work the disk for an
hour or so. SCSI disks can be truly low-level formatted (the drive itself
knows how to do this), but (a) it takes forever, and (b) you shouldn't be
doing it all that often.
For reinitialising (which means creating a new filesystem in Drive Setup or
doing an "Erase" from the Finder) you do gain a fresh filesystem with no
fragmentation. You could also get that by erasing all the files from the
disk and running Disk First Aid for good luck, but erasing is faster
because there's essentially one step involved (and it has that
psychological benefit again ;).
The main point is that you *don't* need to reformat the physical disk to
get a fresh filesystem, and you probably shouldn't bother (especially with
IDE).
For the technically inclined, a low-level format means writing the
information that the drive actually uses to separate the sectors of data on
the disk surface. IDE disks are pretty dumb internally, and they simply
have no way to do this - when that metadata gets too old to read back
reliably, the drive has to be thrown out. Since they also have no real way
to map out and reallocate the data sectors that will have gone bad over the
same period of time, this is probably a blessing, to users at least if not
landfills.
I can concur that installing OE5 over IE4.5 will slightly speed up page
rendering on the 2400. In fact, you don't even need to install OE5 - if you
use another mail client, just copy the "Microsoft Internet First Run" from
the distribution over the old one in the IE4.5 folder and run it once to
update the library files in the System Folder. You can throw out "Microsoft
Framework" for a couple of megs when you're done with IE too; it's not used
by IE4.5. You might want to run OE in "test drive" mode first (nice
feature) just to enter the iMac contest. ;) I must admit, the installation
method is fairly slick too.
--
Marc Sira | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If you can't play with words, what good are they?"
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