Norton OK?

B

Billy MF T

Registered
Hey all

a while back I ran Norton disc doctor and speed disc and it did nasty things to my os x HD. I then read bad things about Norton so I stopped using it

I was just wondering if times had changed and people were safely using norton to optimise their os x drives or if there is another program people can recommend?

Thanks in advance
 
I use Norton on my Non-X partitions without problems, i dare not use Norton on my X partition again, due to the havoc it caused. i haven't had any problems since 10.3, at least not yet, well over a month, maybe 2, not sure when i got it.
 
ok thanks for that

so do leave your comp on all night? Doesn't os x have a built in cleaner that does its thing around 2am?

Thanks again
 
well I made my own applescripts that run those scripts via Entourage Daily, weekly and monthly at my specified times. Both weekly and monthly run early on Sunday, around 11am, when i know i'm not working. I always place my system to sleep at night, considering I'm not out or i don't fall asleep downstairs on the couch and i happen to forget, which i've been doing a lot as of late.
 
right ok...

I don't know the first thing about writing apple scripts - are there any utilities that will do it for me?

Thanks again
 
Cocktail, it use to be free, that pissed me off enough that i made my own scripts, that took a while to work out the bugs, but a good learning experience none the less. I'm sure others can point to a few apps that you can use effortlessly.
 
you can as well run the maintnenance from the terminal .. - just don't try this if you have no idea what terminal is. if you know what it is, you can do it, sometimes.. lets say weekly or so.

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

or:

sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic monthly

(any of those; they will run the routines when you want.)
 
You can use a program called Mac Janitor, which can be found on version tracker, it is free. Or you can run them via the command line.

sudo /etc/daily
sudo /etc/weekly
sudo /etc/monthly

each as it corresponds to its name.
 
Urbansory

Would you mind posting your scripts for others that may want to use them?

If you do, post in the How To's forum.

Thanks
 
I have a semi-dumb question. Do these middle-of-the-night cron things run if your computer is sleeping?

If not, who the heck leaves their Mac fully awake 24/7?
 
No, they don't. I haven't used the Sleep feature in years, because of the problems it caused in earlier systems, and never turn my main machine off.
 
Oh, OK. So then do you let the display and hard disk go to sleep and not the computer? Or do you just let the thing run full blown all the time?

Just curious.

I have had sleep issues in the past, but not in a couple of years, so I let it just go to sleep. I enjoy its quiet slumber.

Actually, you know what. Ironically, I have to turn OFF the hard drive spin down option in Energy Saver because of problems. For example, one of my internal drives will never wake up if I let it spin down. The rest wake up.

There's always something. Ugh.
 
I let the displays go to sleep, then off, but not the computer, that means the Hard drives stay awake and on.
 
norton has a VERY BAD history of killing harddrives. i would never again trust in a software maker who claims to do good things to harddrives and actually does bad things. i maybe simple about this, but i think in order to sell harddrive tools, one should do much, much, much more careful betatesting.
and for the argument that goes something like "yes, but that was when apple updated their systems and norton had not yet released patches for their software", i can't second that. 1st: it happened also on well-tested apple systems and 2nd: norton has ALWAYS enough time to test against betas of apple's next OS releases and should be able to release patches even BEFORE apple releases an update/upgrade.

my advice: use apple's tools. use disk utility to repair your harddrives from time to time and to repair permissions. run the cron jobs from time to time. make backups of all your important data (best: mirror the whole harddisk). no other tools are required than the ones that come with Mac OS X. and IF there's a problem and your data goes to nirwana, a reinstall and retrieve-from-backup is always your safest (and often fastest) bet, anyways.
 
If you get in a jam, use Diskwarrior. I've seen plenty of evidence that it works very well at volume recovery.

Doug
 
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