how and do you need to defragment a hard drive on mac os x tiger. Can you use a built in utility?

Question

I recently purchased a mac book pro, first generation -- and am a windows user switching to a mac. Is there any way to properly uninstall programs completely, and not leave any files associated with that program on your harddrive?

Answer 1

Because of the difference in the file format of Mac and DOS-Windows, fragmented drive problems are almost exclusively absent from Macs. There is and never has been any built-in defrag utility on any Mac. In my opinion, and you'll surely hear the same from any long-term Mac user, you shouldn't worry about drive fragmentation on any Mac unless you use Final Cut Pro for video editing and even then, it is a rarely seen problem.

Having begun my computer use with Windows and knowing the gains that could be made from defragging, I once decided I needed to defrag my Mac that I had used heavily for two years running. I timed some intense tasks in Photoshop before and after defragging. No difference at all. In the 7 years since that instance, I have not used any defrag program on my Mac.

I have three internal hard drives with a total of 7 partitions so if I have some problem with a partition, I copy the files to another partition and erase the problem partition. That takes a lot less time than any defrag program and it does virtually the same thing while fixing most any format issue that could arise.

To remove a program from your Mac, drag it to the trash along with any preference files (very small, usually). There is no automatic uninstall feature and, as a matter of fact, there is hardly such on any Windows computer as it usually leaves files scattered about after the "uninstall". The web site of the program maker can help you to track down any odd fragments. Also, a search for the program name can help. There is no registry to give you headaches so you are only dealing with drive space and "What the heck is that?" questions when you find some small bit left behind a year later.

Answer 2

Strictly conversing, it fairly is against the license for Mac OS X. in spite of the incontrovertible fact that, your difficulty is that the OS won't installation on apersistent formatted in NTFS or FAT32. probability is the installer is accustomed on your drives are there, yet you dont have any installable partitions. It needs to be formatted as a Mac Journalized or united statespartition to place in.