Sixth in a series of articles on how to have a successful relationship with your Mac.
What's going on here? It's never been this slow before. And I'm crashing and bombing all the time.
Good thing I have the "Disk Doctor" - Norton Utilities 3.1. This is certainly one application that you just can't get along without. Think of it as you would a tune-up for your car. It makes it run better, quicker and more efficiently. It can also spot minor problems before they get to be big problems. As well, it can fix almost all problems - easily and quickly. And like a tune-up, schedule your maintenance regularly. If you drive your Mac everyday, then once a week should do it. If you only drive it to church on Sundays, then once a month or so will do fine.
So, what is Norton Utilities and what does it do?
First of all, Norton has too many features to go into detail in this short space, so I'll only cover the most important features - Diagnostics, Optimization and File Recovery. When you launch the diagnostics (the "Disk Doctor"), the program scans your hard drive (or any other drive you designate). It looks at the blocks of your drive, checks and analyzes all files, looks for lost files and checks hierarchy. If any problems are found, you are given the option to fix the problem, or if Norton is unable to fix it, an alternative solution is offered. When the scan is complete you can print out a detailed report outlining any problems found and their result.
Next, you will launch Speed Disk to Optimize your hard drive. With this feature of the application, Norton will check your drive for fragmentation. What is Fragmentation, you ask? Well, every time you add, delete or move a file on your hard drive, it becomes fragmented. Instead of writing your jobs to disk in a continuous (contiguous) fashion, it looks for the first available empty space on the drive. Let's say your file is 2,000K and the first empty space on the drive is 600K. So what happens is this - 600K of your file is written to this empty area, leaving 1,400K. The next available space is 800K, so 800K is written here, leaving 600K, which is written to the next available empty space. What you have now is a file in 3 segments. The Mac knows where all parts of your file area and will find them all when you open the file next time. However, if it has to look in three separate places on the hard drive for one file, it will not be as fast as having your file all together in one piece. Optimization will fix this. All files are reorganized into contiguous files for quicker access time. By the way, did you know that when you put a file into the Trash, followed by the instruction "Empty" that this file is still on the hard drive - and that you can probably recover these files - even weeks later - when you discover to your horror - that you trashed the wrong file or deleted it by accident? Norton also comes complete with a great data recovery feature. It's simple to use and can recover most files under most circumstances.
If you take good care of your hard drive, it will give you years of reliable performance. If you ignore the required routine maintenance, there is a very good chance that your drive will just up and crash on you! Certainly not a chance worth taking!
So stay tuned to this column to learn more about your relationship with a Mac. Watch for these insightful articles: How to nurse a sick Mac back to healthCare and Feeding of the Macand more!
The Mac Lady is an independent web designer located in Vancouver, BC. Your comments and suggestions are always welcome and appreciated.
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