Mac G3 Defrag...........?

Question

Hi there........ I have a Mac G3 powerbook +_ 20GBMemory.
Seems to be running a bit slowly recently.... How do I defrag my hard disk........ while keping ALL my programs intact
PLEASE NO COMPLICATED COMPUTER JARGON.... A+B+C ect.Thanks in advance David

Answer 1

First, I'll give you the meat of the answer. Forget about defragging any Mac. Except in some situations of professional video editing with Final Cut Pro, you will not see any improvement from defragging a Mac hard drive. But if you have never erased or defragged your 8 year old drive, you could be the rare candidate... nah, I still say forget it.

I don't think OS X has any way to automatically defrag the hard drive but people keep saying this. Where do they get this idea? If it did, why would we have the option to download and use Xsanity Defrag, a free defragging program?

Concerning the idea of copying ALL your files to an external drive and then copy ALL of them back to your hard drive, you won't copy any OS X installed files unless you are very selective about it and are an absolute genius at understanding what all those files do. By reading your comment about keeping away from complicated jargon, I think you should avoid the idea. You should just copy the files you have added yourself. Then you would boot to the OS X install CD, erase the drive and install OS X. After that, you copy any personal files back. If you copy any OS X installed files and get them mixed in with different versions of files, things can get all wacked out.

When you get to the point of installing OS X again and the computer restarts, you'll be at the "Welcome" blahblah screen where it lets you create a user account. Be very careful to make the account the same short name as the old user account. That's the name of your user folder. Otherwise, the system will try to protect the old files from being opened by a "different" user.

In conclusion, I still say forget about defragging. Take a more analytical approach to understanding what is slow, when and how. Then present the question again with more specifics, such as "Why is my PB G3 running OS 10.2.8 very slow on the Internet on Tuedays between 9 and 11 a.m. if my cat is sleeping next to it?" I'm making this up but it does illustrate how carefully you should observe the problem to describe it in detail.

Answer 2

If you are running OS X, you do not need to defrag your drive. OS X automatically defrags most files as they are written to disk. This is probably not the reason your Powerbook is running slowly; make sure you have at least 10% of your hard disk space empty.

If you are running OS 9, there are two ways to do it: Buy or borrow an external hard drive, copy the files from your Powerbook to it, erase the Powerbook's hard drive, and copy the files back.

Or, purchase Norton Utilities for Mac which has a Defrag option. I don't recall a non-commercial software defragger for Macs, sorry.

Answer 3

OS X leopard calls for an 800mhz (or thereabouts) and better G4 processor to place in. Apple frequently would not help 0.33 social gathering enhancements. So the answer to a G3 improve might additionally to be no.

Answer 4

get rid of temp internet files, then use tools to defrag