[Hidden-tech] Need quick advice on Mac OS 10.2.8, please

[Will Loving]

Hi Shel,

In general, unless your disk is more than 80% full, it is my understanding
that defragmentation on a Mac is not particularly necessary nor does it
produce noticeable results. You can find details on defragmentation and
lots of other good advice on regular Mac Maintenance at the MacAttorney
website:

http://www.macattorney.com/ts.html#Anchor-Note-51722

One of the key things you can do are to run one of the various maintenance
utilities like Cocktail which will clear your caches and do various other
things that the UNIX based system won't do automatically unless is it left
on 24 hours a day (some maintenance only runs in the wee hours). Cleaning
the caches in particular may help the overall speed. Cocktail and similar
apps can be found at http://versiontracker.com

An option which may help things is to perform an "Archive and Install" from
the Startup/Install disk. This will install a completely new system while
preserving all your accounts and preferences. To do an Archive and Install,
boot off the startup disk and then when you get to a dialog that includes
and "Options" button, go to Options and click on Archive and Install
including the "Preserve User Preferences" checkbox.

You don't say what machine you are using, but if your machine supports it
and you can find an install disk, I highly recommend going from 10.2.x to
10.3. You'll find the whole system loads much faster and is distinctly
'snappier'. It will also give you a more recent version of Safari and other
applications.

As far as Eudora goes, you can't allocate memory in OS X, it's allocated
automatically, which leads me to believe that you are using the OS 9 version
of Eudora. Assuming that is the case. I suggest upgrading to an OS X version
so you don't have to run it in "Classic" mode.

Finally, I don't know why your screen went blank during the upload, but
there is a nice little OS X utility called "Jiggler" (also at
VersionTracker.com) which will keep the machine from falling asleep, either
indefinitely or for a specified amount of time. I regularly use when I'm
running a many hours process overnight and want the machine to stay awake
until it's done.

Will

Will Loving, President
Dedication Technologies, Inc.



on 4/5/07 5:48 PM, Shel Horowitz at shel at frugalfun.com wrote:

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> 
> Hi, HTers, I've got three questions.
> 
> 1. How does one defrag a hard drive in OS 10.2.8? I knew how to do it
> in OS 1-9 but I don't know how with my current system. Performance
> has gotten really slow the last couple of weeks, and I suspect
> fragmentation. (Or is there something else I should be doing to
> restore performance speed?). It has used 34.65GB out of 55.89.
> 
> 2. Twice this week, I have been unable to wake up this Mac when it's
> asleep. Both times it was several hours into a massive file upload
> using YouSendIt (today's was ~680MB, and it got up to 30% within a
> couple of hours, then just sat there, and then when I came back an
> hour after I'd last used it, no matter what I did, I got a dark
> screen with only the power light on). I don't know if a similar
> problem had occurred the previous time, but I *was* in the middle of
> an upload.
> 
> 3. I'm also having difficulties with Eudora. It's crashing a lot,
> with no particular pattern about why (other than if the mail comes in
> when it's not the top-most application, it will often crash--but
> lately it's been crashing for other reasons too. This is the paid
> version, v. 6.2.3. I have the memory set to minimum size of 13,312K
> and the recommended at 14,336 (the program's default is like 4MB). I
> tried to bump up the memory, but even when the program's not running,
> the finder won't let me change those numbers as I did in the past.
> 
> Anyone got any advice about any of this?
> 
> Thanks a bunch.


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