how often do you format your comp?

[CubaTBird]

what about iPod formatting? hehe.. yeah once in a while i would hook up my 3rd gen to my ibook, fire up disc utility and just do a full format on it.. then resync up my songs... i felt my ipod would perform faster... did it? seemed liked it.. maybe it was just me...

 

[IJ Reilly]

I think that the kind of people who regularly format their hard drives and usually the kind of people who need to and those who don't format are usually the kind of people who don't need to.

I install and build all kinds of stuff regularly, so I like to clean up occasionally with a format and reinstall, but I can imagine that if I only authored some documents/images and browsed the net and wrote emails I would probably never need to do it.

But who are the kind of people who need to? I use my Mac very heavily, and never need to reformat it for any reason. Maybe you should rephrase that to "people who regularly format their hard drives are usually the kind of people who feel a need to and those who don't format are usually the kind of people who don't feel any need to.

The emphasis of course is on how they feel.

 

[link92]

I format it every 5 years or so, just to clear out all the junk I've ended up with.

 

[ham_man]

Okay, you're paranoid.

Actually, I'm probably even more paranoid than you. I can't stand the idea of potentially losing something important in one of these periodic enforced housecleaning exercises, so I never do them.

I also can't resist pointing out that most of the performance enhancements being reported by the regular reformatters could probably achieved with far less effort, disruption and risk of catastrophe by simply running a good maintenance utility on a regular basis.

Actually, when I said before every every X.1 install, that just means Tiger, the only OS that I have that did not come pre-installed...

I mainly did it because I had a lot of Trial software that I did not want, so I wanted it gone. So I did a format. Not sure if I will do it for Leopard though...

Oh, and on the subject of being paranoid, I do a full backup of my machine to an external, burn my documents and photos to a CD, and put my most important stuff on a thumb drive. You can never be too careful...

 

[EGT]

I also can't resist pointing out that most of the performance enhancements being reported by the regular reformatters could probably achieved with far less effort, disruption and risk of catastrophe by simply running a good maintenance utility on a regular basis.

There are lots floating about. Any recommendations for which is best to use?

 

[IJ Reilly]

There are lots floating about. Any recommendations for which is best to use?

I constantly recommend AppleJack. It's a free utility that runs in single user mode. So far it's fixed every software problem I've ever encountered in OSX. If you have to do something to your Mac every so many months, try running AppleJack instead of reformatting.

 

[EGT]

Thanks

 

[kneden]

so does anyone have any ideas why it would show up as 1 gig of ram for awhile then change to 512mb? then i would have to reinstall the ram to make it appear as 1gig of ram but then it changes again after awhile?

is it ultimately a bad stick of ram or could it be something wrong with the powerbook itself?

Could be the stick, or it could be the RAM slot. I just got my 15" powerbook back from a warranty repair for the lower RAM slot (main logic board needed to be replaced). Seems some 15" powerbooks are suffering from this.

How to tell which it is? When it happens, use "About This Mac" from the Apple menu, "More Info", and then "Memory" and check which slot (LOWER or UPPER) isn't showing the memory. Then switch the DIMMs around and try again. If the problem follows the DIMM, then it is probably the memory itself, but if the problem is always the same memory slot, then it sounds like you have the same problem I did.

If you do have the slot problem, then I hope you are covered by the warranty (I was). Some people have a petition asking Apple to recognize the problem.

K.

 

[chv400]

I format my computer as little as I possibly can since its a pain to restore it and there is no point in formating if you're just going to clone the hard drive format it then imprint the clone back onto it since all that does is makes your computer identical to what it was before the format.

 

[lopresmb]

it this your problem???
https://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=122576

thanks for the replies abotu formatting.

i know it was confusing cause i was just going to talk about formatting but then i just wanted to talk about the ram in my brothers powerbook to see whats up.

so does anyone have any ideas why it would show up as 1 gig of ram for awhile then change to 512mb? then i would have to reinstall the ram to make it appear as 1gig of ram but then it changes again after awhile?

is it ultimately a bad stick of ram or could it be something wrong with the powerbook itself?