I'm New To Mac, Couple Basic Questions

[mischief]

Micromat claims that TTP4 does disk optimization (defragging):

http://www.micromat.com/tt_pro_4/tt_pro_4.html


Please note, they also say that journalling should be turned off before attempting to defrag your drive. This might account for the speed and other issues you're seeing.

Interesting. It appears that the only place the Optimization option appears is on the damn eDrive. So in order to use Techtool to Defrag I have to boot with the external plugged in and the option key held down (takes forever) then boot to the edrive and let Techtool do it's bloody slow diagnostics on the volumes and files, then switch tabs, shut off Journalling and THEN optimize. Yeesh. I'll stick to Norton. It's been quicker at doing the job, seems to have a cleaners interface (not prettier mind you, cleaner) and involves less circumnavigation to get to.

Norton simply does the job and does it well. I'm sorry that so many of you got scared off during that bumpy patch between OS 9.2 and OS X.2 but I can tell you that if you're consciencious it works just fine.

I think the reason it was slow was twofold:

1: I was booted via FW400, which is laways slower that booting from the internal ATA bus.

2: Techtool is slower that Norton.

What's Onyx? I haven't seen that one before.

 

[yellow]

What's Onyx? I haven't seen that one before.

From the installation script:

OnyX is a maintenance, optimization, and personalization utility. It also makes it possible to configure certain hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock, and Safari, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome, preview the different logs and CrashReporter, and more.

Basically, it seems to be a GUI wrapping for command line stuff that already exists.

 

[jack0545]

amazing comprehensive advice. you guys should be paid.

after g... i changed my processor setting in system tools, HUGE help.

faintmemeber... i'd like to try repairing the permissions, mac janitor, and mac sweeper but how do i? i looked in applications, and tried spotlight to find the programs but i couldn't. do i need to download them? where would i go to find permissions to repair it?

cless... command and drag, that's what i was looking for. THANK YOU!

yellow... if i just clicked and dragged a file, be it a word file, a picture, a folder from my desktop into a folder on my desktop, a copy would be made.


so i think i've decided to not defrag for a while. i trust you mischeif, but i also trust everyone else who has had such bad experiences with norton. i'm uneasy about it. maybe i'll try the new tech tool with defrag?

anyway, thanks again for all this VERY helpful advice.

last question... for using shortcuts... the character that is the slant with the little minus sign on the upper right...where is that on thhe keyboard?

 

[yellow]

yellow... if i just clicked and dragged a file, be it a word file, a picture, a folder from my desktop into a folder on my desktop, a copy would be made.

This is abnormal behavior. Are you using a multi-button mouse that you might have changed the single click pointer to an Option-click by accident? Please log in as another user (create one if need-be) and see if this problem follows you there.

last question... for using shortcuts... the character that is the slant with the little minus sign on the upper right...where is that on thhe keyboard?

Option

 

[mischief]

amazing comprehensive advice. you guys should be paid.

after g... i changed my processor setting in system tools, HUGE help.

faintmemeber... i'd like to try repairing the permissions, mac janitor, and mac sweeper but how do i? i looked in applications, and tried spotlight to find the programs but i couldn't. do i need to download them? where would i go to find permissions to repair it?

cless... command and drag, that's what i was looking for. THANK YOU!

yellow... if i just clicked and dragged a file, be it a word file, a picture, a folder from my desktop into a folder on my desktop, a copy would be made.


so i think i've decided to not defrag for a while. i trust you mischeif, but i also trust everyone else who has had such bad experiences with norton. i'm uneasy about it. maybe i'll try the new tech tool with defrag?

anyway, thanks again for all this VERY helpful advice.

last question... for using shortcuts... the character that is the slant with the little minus sign on the upper right...where is that on thhe keyboard?

Several of us do, in fact get paid to do this stuff.

Repairing permissions can be found in Disk Utility in Apllications/Utilities.

The rest of these nifty toys can be found as freeware on http://www.versiontracker.com.

If you simply drag between the drive's main directory and any directory resident in a User subdirectory, including the desktop a copy will be made. This is because User account directories are treated as seperate volumes.

The slant with the little minus sign is "Shift". As in: "Apple-Shift-N" to create a new file folder in the Finder.

I appreciate the trust and understand your skepticism. Honestly Defrag is something better left to those who can do it right while stinking drunk on a mostly DOA drive while juggling plates. Those like Yellow and I.

 

[yellow]

The slant with the little minus sign is "Shift". As in: "Apple-Shift-N" to create a new file folder in the Finder.

Actually, Shift is represented as an upward pointing arrow.
The \- thingy is Option.

 

[mischief]

Actually, Shift is represented as an upward pointing arrow.
The \- thingy is Option.

Ah yes, my mistake.

 

[jack0545]

This is abnormal behavior. Are you using a multi-button mouse that you might have changed the single click pointer to an Option-click by accident? Please log in as another user (create one if need-be) and see if this problem follows you there.


Option

so i created a new account and logged on and, you're right, dragging files into folders didn't create copies. what the eff?

do you know how my mouse got set incorrectly? i went into system prefs. in the mouse section, and there didn't look like there was an option to make a single click and option/single click.

annd thanks a lot for that site mischeif, i got both macjanitor and mac sweeper and found the permissions repair.

you guys are awesome!

 

[yellow]

It wouldn't be in the default Mouse prefpane, it would be in a 3rd party prefpane. Something like Microsoft Mouse or similar.. are you using a 3rd party mouse?

 

[jack0545]

yes, i'm using a microsoft right/left click scroll mouse. but when i logged in as the other user, that wasn't a problem.

 

[yellow]

yes, i'm using a microsoft right/left click scroll mouse. but when i logged in as the other user, that wasn't a problem.

Yes, because the saved profile for the mouse settings are on a per-user basis.

Go back to your broken user.

Open /Applications/Microsoft Mouse.app.
Go to the "Buttons" tab for Global Settings.
Make sure the Left Button is set to Click.
Is it?

 

[jack0545]

microsoft mouse.app isn't in my applications... i can't find it with spotlight (a completely useless tool for me so far). do you know where else it might be?

 

[Eidorian]

microsoft mouse.app isn't in my applications... i can't find it with spotlight (a completely useless tool for me so far). do you know where else it might be?

Did you install the application? The IntelliPoint 5.1 software is very annoying for OS X. I really do like my horizontal scrolling so I live with it...

 

[jack0545]

no, i skipped the install. should i go back and do it? i guess i could live with hitting command + drag, if that's the only setback.

 

[yellow]

Try installing it.. having to use Cmd-Drag sux. It should not be making multiple copies of the same file over and over. I'm really not sure where the broken pref file is. It could be the Finder pref, it could be something else. But installing IntelliPoint 5.1 is a good start.

 

[jack0545]

i've installed it and now it works fine. thanks so much yellow, and everyone else who helped out on this thread. i hope it all comes back to you.

 

[faintember]

faintmemeber... i'd like to try repairing the permissions, mac janitor, and mac sweeper but how do i? i looked in applications, and tried spotlight to find the programs but i couldn't. do i need to download them? where would i go to find permissions to repair it?

Me and Mischief agree on something:
VersionTracker is a great place to find Macjanitor and Macsweeper. In MacJanitor run "All Tasks" and in MacSweeper click on the "Batch" tab and select "Run Everything".

Repairing Permissions is done by: user/applications/utilities/disk utility (or just do a spotlight seach for "disk utility", hehe, i love spotlight). Select Macintosh HD (or the name of your hard drive) in the left hand window area, then click on "Repair Permissions". I repair permissions after i install or remove software, or if i decide to move some mp3's that i dont listen to that much onto a cd, or dvd-r, i typically repair permissions after moving a lot of files. Seems to keep my PB happy.

Glad to hear you are getting some good help. The people on this forum are really great with helping people and thats why i spend so much time on here.. lol

-cameron

 

[yellow]

FYI, you only need to repair permissions after installing something that asks for an admin password.

 

[faintember]

FYI, you only need to repair permissions after installing something that asks for an admin password.

Hummm i didnt know that. Thanks.

 

[mischief]

Me and Mischief agree on something:
VersionTracker is a great place to find Macjanitor and Macsweeper. In MacJanitor run "All Tasks" and in MacSweeper click on the "Batch" tab and select "Run Everything".

Oh come now! We both know that in the hands of the inexperienced any Utility program can cause fatal problems, likewise, in the hands of a seasoned Tech nearly any comprehensive Utility suite can be an excellent tool. All else is tribalism.

I was just feeling my dawgs was bein dissed.

 

[decksnap]

Oh come now! We both know that in the hands of the inexperienced any Utility program can cause fatal problems, likewise, in the hands of a seasoned Tech nearly any comprehensive Utility suite can be an excellent tool. All else is tribalism.

I was just feeling my dawgs was bein dissed.

Do you WORK for Norton or what?

 

[mischief]

Do you WORK for Norton or what?

Nope, I've just had it recover several drives that nothing else could even see on the bus. The more I use it (and map out it's eccentricities) the more comfortable with it and confident in it's abilities I am. However I've got no illusions about how dangerous it is to use a Utility suite on an incompatible system, so I'm also very careful.

It's allowed me to recover some VERY badly crashed drives, including rescuing data off half a dozen with nearly dead heads/mechanisms. One drive was so badly FUBAR I actually had to take it out, whip it along the axis of rotation to unfreeze the bearings then quickly boot it before it could freeze up again. It's recovered drives where the Volume structures were so far gone that no other Utility program could see that it had ever been written to beyond formatting. I've used it to debug machines with heavy Java virus loads, manage the wackiness that Retrospect causes and mitigate the problems (including those caused by using the wrong Norton) associated with the OS 9 to X transition.

I've been using both Techtool and Norton for several years now and I've fixed a ton of machines in that time. I've found that for me it's techtool that randomly FUBARs drives. This is why I genuinely believe it's not the software but the user that makes the difference. All of us techies are pretty conservative about our tools and techniques. Once you get good with something and it works like magic damnnear every time you get pretty attatched to that set of tools and techniques. It just gets irritating when something you know works reliably and effectively gets slammed because people don't RTFM and then scream their heads off about how "the software screwed up their Mac!!!!!". It wasn't the software honey, it was User Error.

 

[decksnap]

Well even Norton thinks it's bad. It has been discontinued as far as I can tell.

"Symantec has announced it has discontinued Norton Utilities or Norton SystemWorks and it will not be updating either program. Users should investigate other disk repair utilities such as Techtools or DiskWarrior.

Symantec has posted a note saying that the only Norton product compatible with Mac OS 10.4.X (Tiger) is Norton Antivirus 10.0 for the Macintosh. Do not use other Norton products because the results will be at best partially successful and may in fact cause damage to your computer. For more information check the Symantec website."

 

[mischief]

Well even Norton thinks it's bad. It has been discontinued as far as I can tell.

"Symantec has announced it has discontinued Norton Utilities or Norton SystemWorks and it will not be updating either program. Users should investigate other disk repair utilities such as Techtools or DiskWarrior.

Symantec has posted a note saying that the only Norton product compatible with Mac OS 10.4.X (Tiger) is Norton Antivirus 10.0 for the Macintosh. Do not use other Norton products because the results will be at best partially successful and may in fact cause damage to your computer. For more information check the Symantec website."

Yeouch. Good thing I know better than to try an old copy with a new system. Poop, I'll have to get to know TechTool better then.

Dammit.