This week’s installment of “Stuff I Use” concerns an essential application that, even though it doesn’t get much use, is vital to my Mac’s health. All computers (yes, even Macs), over time, require a bit of disk maintenance in two areas. First, keeping the directory (where information about what’s on your computer is kept) healthy; and second, optimizing and de-fragmenting your hard drive. As you use your computer, adding and erasing from your drive, new data is placed in the next available block, causing large files to sometimes be split up and placed where there’s space, instead of all together in one place. De-fragmenting a drive reconnects the pieces of individual files, and stores them together, making the drive more efficient. This is especially important if you’re working with large files (DV video, for example) and can really make a performance difference.

There are several disk maintenance tools for Macs: Norton Utilities, Drive 10, and the one I use: DiskWarrior from Alsoft ($69.95, www.alsoft.com). Disk Warrior doesn’t just repair or patch your existing directory, it builds a replacement directory, and is really effective in recovering lost files. I personally saw this in action when the drive on my PowerBook started “acting funky” (a technical term there). I booted from the Disk Warrior CD into OS9, ran Disk Warrior, and in no time the “funkiness” had disappeared, and my PowerBook ran faster and smoother. The current version, DiskWarrior 2.1, boots into OS9, but it can do it’s magic on OSX installations. Disk Warrior 3, due soon, will boot into OSX and have increased and improved capabilities to fix OSX systems. Disk Warrior also comes bundled with Plus Optimizer, which handles the optimizing and de-fragmentation duties. Several other users I know swear by DiskWarrior, and I’ve heard many tales of DiskWarrior fixing problems that befuddled Norton and other utilities.

So, that’s this week’s “Stuff I Use”. What do you use, and why? Let me know at petez@macmaineiac.com.

Homework for this week - check out the following link: http://www.mainehost.com/contest/home.html. Time for you aspiring student web designers to dust off GoLive or Dreamweaver and get in the hunt. More details next week!

Until then, have another great weekend, and, as always, Semper Mac!

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski