New DP 1ghz G4 User With Questions

J

JackSparks

Registered
Hi,
I'm an owner of a brand spanking new Dual 1 gig G4. This is my first mac as a long time PC user. I have a question about partitioning my drive. Do I realy need to? Many people have told me about the benefits of having a partitioned drive but I'm not sure if I know what they mean? What are the advantages or disadvantages of partitioned a drive?

Finaly, the MAC manuals are not very informative is there somewhere I can go to learn more about the operating system (how to best manage documents, installing and uninstalling software..ect.)

I have to say I love my new mac. I just want to become a better user.

Thanks,

Jack Sparks
 
Welcome

The drive partitioning topic is a usual question. If you do a search on these boards on partitioning your drive (and put OS 9 on one partition and OS X on the other i suppose) you will find many threads about it.

My opinion is that it's not so very important if you partition or not. It's mostly just to keep your systems organized and seperated. It works perfectly fine to have all at one partition too, but then again things will be more cluttered.
 
First, I have to say--I envy you for having the dual-GHz G4 Mac! But then again, next year around this time--you will envy me--for getting the same machine for half the cost ^_^.

Okay, now here is what you are looking for.
As a 12 year old Mac user and a 8 year old PC user who build his own Macs and PCs, I also understand that partitioning helps make things organized. But both Microsoft and Apple only provide distructive partitioning tools (FDISK for MS; Drive Setup for Apple), meaning you have to reformat your hard drive in order to paritition--make sure to save your data if you decided to use either tools.

However, to me, what's more important is not whether OS 9 and OS X are in separate partitions--but whether your hard disk is fragmented. Here is a good article about fragmentation (http://www4.tomshardware.com/howto/01q3/010906/raid-01.html). Data fragmentation surely is a performance killer.

Let me know if you find a good defragmentation tool for the Mac because other than the Norton stuff, all I do is move my files to another hard disk, reformat my system HD, then move my files back to it. Stupid, but it works!

Let me know.

George Lien
georgelien@email.com
 
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