Any Good Progs To Optimize Osx?, stuff like norton/disk warrior.... Options

[SupaSandeep]

hi im new to the board i was wonder which program you guys reccomend for defraggin/ optimizing performance... i hear disk warrior is good, i have a couple friends who sed norton messed up their systems... please help!
also are there any free apps that defrag??

[Dave Bourke]

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly are essential housekeeping tasks performed automatically by Unix. Unix assumes that your machine is turned on and running 24/7 so these tasks are scheduled by cron for between 3.00 and 5.00 in the morning.

However, most Mac users either turn their machines off or sleep them, so these tasks are never run on such machines. As a result, log files and databases will either grow to be huge or won't get backed up.

The tasks can be run at any time from within Terminal, but because most Mac users are not comfortable with command-line user interfaces, Brian Hill designed a graphic user interface for the routine – MacJanitor.

It is important to state that MacJanitor does NOT optimise disks in any way. If you want to do this, TechTool Pro 4 is the only way to go. Avoid Norton like the plague.

DiskWarrior 3 will not optimise disks – it does just one very important thing, and does it extremely well: it optimises and repairs your directory structure. If you're serious about the health and safety of your data, DiskWarrior 3 and TechTool Pro 4 are essential.

Onyx does just about everything that Cocktail does – but it's free (it will also perform the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly routines that MacJanitor does).

For cloning drives, absolutely nothing (not even the Apple Disk Utility) beats Carbon Copy Cloner – it's also free.

To summarise, the only utilities you need for OS X disk and system maintenance and backup are DiskWarrior 3, TechTool Pro 4, Onyx, and Carbon Copy Cloner. Two out of these four are free, the other two are very reasonable in price, considering they can save your ass. Look at it like this: what is your time and inspiration/perspiration worth to you?

Kind regards.

Dave Bourke