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any utils for mac like defrag n that?

R

robins2001

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 20, 2003
82
0
hi, yep, im another new mac convert...

im just wondering if there are any apps like on pc's which are ment to keep thins running smoothly, like defrag, disk cleanup, reg cleaner etc?

also is there any tweaks or anything i can do to my new mac to keep it running nice and fast...

thanks
 
If you have Panther you have journaling enabled. That's pretty much defrag. Repair you permissions in Disk Utility from time to time. If your computer is left on ovenight it will run some maintenance tasks. If you don't leave it on, you can get MacJanitor from versiontracker.com and it will run them on demand.

That's all the utilities I'd suggest. Even that might be overkill-most people (and I mean most people in general, not most people on Mac message boards) do no maintenance on their computers. Ever. And they still run fine for years and years.

Oh, and since you're coming from the Windows world I should caution you against 1 thing that you might be tempted to do: Avoid anything called "Norton." On Windows Norton AV, utilities, etc are the gold standard but on the Mac they do nothing but cause problems.
 
rite ok thank you...

can you tell me exactly what software restore does? does it take you back to like jst after the os is installed?
 
Originally posted by Horrortaxi
If you have Panther you have journaling enabled. That's pretty much defrag.
Click to expand...

Journaling is NOT defrag. It is a method that can prevent some kinds of catalog errors that occur when something unexpected happens (like a power outage). It doesn't speed up the disk in any way, and in some cases it can actually slow down disk writes.

However, Panther does do some automatic defrag & hot clustering but iirc this only occurs for a limited subset of all files and only on the boot volume. If you want a disk defragger you can pick up packages for around $99. I've used TechToolPro in the past (OS 9 days) but haven't tried it (or Drive 10) on OS X, or any others for that matter. Hopefully someone can chime in on this.

Originally posted by robins2001
can you tell me exactly what software restore does? does it take you back to like jst after the os is installed?
Click to expand...

Software Restore allows you to restore a disk image to a hard drive, typically the image is of your drive as it shipped from Apple (more or less - all the software but other files that shipped on the disk such as demo music may not be on the restore CD). However you can also use the Restore functionality to restore any disk image to your hard drive, which I did recently when I needed to make a complete backup of my system. Just use Disk Utility to make an image of the drive or folder and you can use restore to put it back afterwards.
 
Diskwarrior is the best defrag utitlity for MacOS X. its fast and its reliable. they just released a new G5 compatible version as well.
Norton Antivirus is the only good Norton product for the Mac. i havnt had any problems with it.
TechTool is a decent system diagnostic tool.
that should get you about set.
 
Just confirming what others have said. Avoid anything Norton except maybe anti-virus. But I've had 5 Macs over the last 11 years and have never had a virus or needed anti-virus software (knock on wood). Most virus software slows down your computer a little so unless you have a problem with viruses I wouldn't bother, but that's my opinion.

I used Norton disk doctor once and it screwed up my mac. Had to do a clean install, what a pain. Spring Cleaning is another product that might do more harm than good.

I say: repair permissions every once in a while, run MacJanitor every week or so, turn on firewall under the "sharing" control panel (system prefs I mean), and relax... you'll find your mac is prone to far fewer problems than your PC was.
 
Too bad DW doesn't actually defrag...
I'll toss in a vote for TechToolPro 4, but it's drive utility options beyond hardware become much more limited if you enable journaling. Oh, and that POS known as the registry doesn't exist on OS X. (w00t!)
 
Norton AV

I run norton av. It mainly picks up all the PC virii. So every once in awhile, more lately, I get a pompt from norton av that there is a bad email attachment and it killed it. Not like it would have effected me anyways, but if there is a macro virus in a word document, it should find it so you don't pass it along down the chain to another PC person.

Back to the original question. The system defrags everything it comes across, as in gets used by the you or the OS, if it is smaller than 20MB (I believe that is the magic number). So a full defrag utility is not something that is really needed on a Mac as it is really needed on a PC.
 
Re: Norton AV

Originally posted by varmit
The system defrags everything it comes across, as in gets used by the you or the OS, if it is smaller than 20MB (I believe that is the magic number). So a full defrag utility is not something that is really needed on a Mac as it is really needed on a PC.
Click to expand...
This is correct (assuming you're running 10.3). So long as you're not constantly running a near-full drive with a lot of large files on it, you should be fine without any defragging software. In fact, unlike under Windows and the Classic MacOS, I have seen very few complaints about fragmented disks under OSX, and I believe it's fairly resistant to fragmentation issues--I've heard very few people, even professionals, suggesting defragging or proclaiming its virtues, where that was an extremely common thing to hear pre-OSX.

I might also add that I have a drive full of 500MB-1GB files that's constantly running at 98%-100% of capacity, and it still seems to operate surprisingly smoothly even after months without running a defragger.
 
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