General Maintenance?

J

jb_lyndon

Registered
Hope you guys can help me out with a little advice.
My eMac will hopefully be back from the repair shop this weekend (crashed HD).

eMac/800mhz/512RAM/SuperDrive
First off I'll be installing Jaguar (10.2) and I'm wondering where I should stop updating the OS... 10.2.6?? 10.2.8?? My HD crashed soon after updating to 10.2.8 but I'm not sure if it was the cause?? Oh and should I install the iLife and other "came with computer" software before I update the OS or after??

Ok so once that is done... unfortunately I think I have been negligent in providing good general maintenance to my machine :( And was hoping to get some advice on a good maintenance regime.

How often should I defragment the HD? What should I use?

What AntiVirus software do you and/or would you use? I don't trust Norton.

What other Utilities should I be using to keep the old eMac purring like a kitten?

Oh and my place is quite dusty and my eMac inhales a lot of it so I was thinking of fitting a pair of white nylons to the back to act as an air filter... if this is a bad idea let me know ok.

One more thing... I'm thinking of partitioning the 60GB HD this time but am unsure if it's even necessary and what the advantages and/or disadvantages are. I will be working with and editing video files so maybe it's a good idea? If so, how much room would you leave for the OS partition?

I know I'm kind of all over the place with my questions but if you could help me out I'd be grateful.

Thanks.
 
Well I had problems with Jaguar, and i hate to say get Panther, because some people didn't have problems with Jag. I use Panther, and after having system problems I learned the hard way.

1. partition your drive, and or get another internal drive, not sure if thats possible with a emac. Helps to backup stuff and store data for work more efficiently. I gave my OS 7gb, and I have apps, a few things here and there and i still have 4gb of free space on that partition.

2. I only have Norton System Works, WHICH I DON'T USE ON MY X PARTITION! I just use what Apple gives for that, and I have yet to have a problem on my X partition since I installed it when i got it last year. Norton works fine on non X partitions, fixes any problems i may have which are rare with Panther. And i don't use any antivirus to constantly scan the system.

3. Run maintenance cron scripts regularly and fix permissions every so often.

4.I have my non-Apple apps on a different partition. 3 drives, 5 partitions on my system.

This is mostly what i do.
 
It's been my experience that hard drives last about three years. Now I have two internal and one external HDs in hopes that when the next crash comes I won't lose much. I made all three bootable. BTW, changing a hard drive is very easy.
 
I agree with getting Panther. It is much speedier and stable that Jaguar.
No need to defrag, just repair permissions after updating the software.
Do you have .Mac? Virex is a good anti-virus program, imho.
There's plenty of good system optimizers. Cocktail, OnyX and others, to name a few.
Not sure of the nylons. If it gets warm, that could have an impact. Maybe place a small fan in back to better circulate the air would be better.
I never partition. I guess it's a matter of taste. I keep a full backup on my external drive and I use .mac to backup important stuff to my iDisk as well.
 
I've not had a hard drive crash on me yet, and our G3 tower is 6 years old and my iMac is 4 years old. But maybe I'm just lucky. In any case, you should be sure you always back up anything important (mostly anything irreplaceable, like data) to something like CD-R or a mirrored RAID array (which is more expensive).

Also, buying virus software for the Mac is like buying flood insurance when you live in Las Vegas. It's good to have if anything should happen, but the chances of that are small and you could put the money to something much more worthwhile.
 
Read the archives. Vegas has had floods and flood damage. Just a few years ago. Besides, it never hurts to make sure you're not a carrier of some 'net virus, even if it's unlikely to impact your system. I wouldn't go too far out of the way looking for some, but virus protection doesn't hurt.
 
regular maintainance is an important part of maintaining any computer - even a mac. regularly repairing permissions using disk utility is step one. running the crons on a periodic basis is number 2. i prefer Maintain1 (also known as Maintain Your Mac) because it's free and loaded with plenty of other helpful tools. but any of this genre of maintainence utility will do. a good place to look for them is www.versiontracker.com. as for defragmenting, it probably depends on several factors as to whether or not you should do it. up until last sunday i had a 10 gb internal drive, which doesn't leave much room for swap files and caches. plus i do alot of moving files around. downloading or creating them on the internal and then storing them on an external and/or cd-r. plus i just plain use my mac constantly. so i found that defragmenting was a pretty important thing to do. i could notice a difference afterwards. i have used plus optimizer from alsoft and techtool pro 4 from micromat. both work well. TTP is osx native so i got to preferring it lately.

on the other hand, my gf has a 40 gb internal, hardly uses it for anything other than interneting and an occasional appleworks file. she barely fills up 10 gb of it. i've only defragmented it once in 3 years and i couldn't tell the difference when i did. i just upgraded to 40 gb drive last weekend so my judgement on whether or not i'll need to defrag is still out. but basically anytime you start to hear a bunch of screeching (or other excessive noise) when file searching or reading/writing to disk, then it's probably time to run a defragger.

there will also be times, at least there have been for me, when damages are beyond the extent of disk utility to repair. having a good utility for this is important. again i use TTP 4 and/or diskwarrior. both are great and do slightly different things. DW for osx is my next planned purchase now that i'm working again part time.

with your g4 emac, i would think you would prefer to get panther. but i know i've never had any problems with 10.2.8 that were system related so i'd say go ahead and update all the way. however always make sure your permissions are repaired before you update. and the system is in good working order. updating an already out-of-whack system is just asking for trouble.

as for partitioning, i don't. i've had partitions in the past and find them burdonsome. if you need something seperated, better to use an external firewire drive. but to each their own on this one. if you do partition, be sure to leave enough room on your boot volume for swap files and caches. otherwise it will really slow you down as you write and rewrite to disk.
 
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