fukuhela, thanks
I know how it is being confused and frusterated b/c the computer is not doing what you want and screwing up, so I figure I like to help in any way I can. I also enjoy the challange. It gives me something to do in my spare time other than homework
. Plus, although I don't work for symantec, I love their Norton SystemWorks and promote it at any time. I have NortonUtilities v3.5 and the new SystemWorks and I must say that they have saved me a dozen or more times and also have sped-up my computer a lot. When you have an old 603ev like I do, you want every boost that you can get!
Anyone with one of the new computers that cannot boot into OS9, there is a way to use SpeedDisk and other applications that require a disk unmount (since SystemWorks requires OS9 right now, it is going to take quite a while to tell you what to do to make it work, but bear with me, it is worth every second when your computer goes on the fritz or files start slowing down). You first must partition your HD into at least two partitions. I would recomend making a smaller partition (say 10GB) and then use the rest for the other Partition. If you have a 60GB+ HD, you may want a 20 and 40GB partition. Now, the smaller partition is designed for the primary operating system and program files. You may wonder why not use the larger partition for this? Well, the larger the partition, the larger the Catalog B-tree. The larger the B-tree, the more the compter has to sort through to find where the file it is looking for is on the HD. Thus, for fastest access of programs and OS performance, I would recomend using a small and a large partition. Anyway, now that you have installed the OS on the small partition, you are going to have to install it again on the larger partition (make sure classic is on both HDs, too). Then, you will have to install SystemWorks on both partitions. Now, to optmize the main system/program partition, just boot from the other, optimize, and boot back to the origional. This partitioning is also a very good method b/c if for some reason something goes screwy on your system partition, you will have a way to still boot your system and transfer anything vital on the faulty partition to the secondary partition and then restore the origional partition. I know all of this seems like a TON of work just to get Norton SystemWorks on the computer, but if you do any multi-media production or downloading of software from the net, you will see the advantage of being able to completely optimize a partition. So many files become fragmented that the computer takes 10x more time jumping from the B-Tree to the file and back just for one file than it should.
I hope that I may have helped anyone who wanted to use a good defrag/disk-fix program but had an OSX only machine.
Is Norton SystemWorks as good as I have made it out to be? Some may say no, but from my 4.5 years of using it on a mac and 3-4 years of using the dos and windows versions or it, I say it is even better than I can tell you. It has saved me many times, and I just can't wait for them to make an OSX bootable CD and maybe also an XP bootable CD (but that isn't likely with Microsoft's new way of requiring data to be moved).