On Dec 15, 2006, at 9:01 AM, Garry wrote:
Back in the days when I used OS9, now using X.4.5, I used to
monthly rebuild the Desktop and run Norton Disk Doctor to do
necessary repairs as it suggested as well as defrag the HD. Big
performance increase after that as well as picking more HD space.
Yesterday I tried to rebuild the Desktop in X but found out you
can't. Is this procedure no longer necessary in X?
Can I still use my old Norton Speed Disk utility to defrag my OS X
drive? Is disk fragmentation the issue that is was under OS9?
I have a G4 MDD and because it has space for 4 drives I just took
out the drive from my old dearly departed G3 and plunked it into
the G4.
There is no "rebuild the desktop" for OS X (outside of Classic's
desktop, which Peter correctly answered for you).
OS X stores its file info differently then OS 9 and prior did, so
there is no direct database to need being rebuilt as OS 9 and prior
had. (Despite the name, the "Desktop" that was being rebuilt, had
little to do with the "Desktop" that you see visually... rather it
was the name of the database that held file linking info and folder
storage locations. It was called "Desktop" because it dated back to
the MFS days when there was no such thing as a "folder" and
everything was basically stored "on your desktop"... this was from
early days of the Mac when the OS really was a good analogy to a
physical desk).
So you don't have to worry about doing a desktop rebuilt in OS X.
As for defragging, you really don't have to worry about that either.
OS X takes care of that for you as well. There may still be reasons
to defrag (such as you do massive amounts of high speed data swaps in
small chunks, like run an active database or file server, so your
drive might become fragmented faster than normal and that
fragmentation can cause unwanted decreases in performance), but
chance are, if you are a person that needs to defragment, then you
already know that and know why. But if you are just a normal user and
aren't sure if you need to defragment, then you probably don't need
to every worry about it under OS X.
You also may not need to run Disk First Aid or any other disk
checking utility very often, it depends on how often you reboot your
computer. If you turn your Mac off every day, then chances are you
will almost never need to run a disk checking tool, as OS X does it
for you (and does any needed repairs) every time it boots. If you are
like me and pretty much never turn off your computer, and thus may go
extremely long periods of time between reboots, then you may still
want to run Disk Utility and have it verify the disk from time to time.
What you SHOULD do from time to time is repair the permissions on the
boot drive. This is done via the Disk Utility. Permissions can get
knocked out of whack by all sorts of simple things, and if key
permissions get screwed up, then you can start having problems as the
OS can't read or write to things it needs to get to. Doing a Repair
Permissions will reset everything the OS needs to work with to states
that it needs them to be in.
-chris
<www.mythtech.net>
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