[Ti] Weird Screen Behavior...

[b]

According to John Pariseau:

>I'm wondering why you have the ATI Monitor in Login Items.

>I have no clue.  I double clicked on one of the icons - bad choice - 
>it installed a bunch of files. My impressions was that I had already 
>done this when I downloaded the installer.  I also clicked on the 
>program icons to see what they did. Normally I figure out what 
>something is before double clicking on it.

That's funny, I did the exact same thing after reading your original 
post...clicked on ATI Part 2 and shazam,here came 156 dinky files, oh 
well, now I'm wondering if i had the entire original install,or the 
ATI Installer is too 'dumb' to know it's over-writing itself, 
whatever .. it still works  :=)
>
>>2- Run the Disk Utility on the drive, from a separate partition, or 
>>the Install disk, if you have only one partition.
>
>Ok, but what should I do? I ran fix permissions yesterday (for an 
>unrelated problem).

Oops, forgot to mention to run the "Repair Disk" in Disk Utility, 
don't waste time running verify, just run repair disk, and skip the 
Permissions unless you install additional software.

>>4- Optimize your drive, after making adequate space on it. Use 
>>Norton Speed Disk, or DiskWarrior Plus Optimizer, if you have the 
>>DW CD.
>
>I have neither. Is their any good reason to do this?

Look at it this way: A month ago  ran Speed disk, from Norton, on my 
20 GB OSX partition, and even though my Finder said, accurately, that 
i had over 5 Gigabytes of 'free' drive space, when I first cranked up 
Speed disk it went through the partition and said I indeed had that 
much space, but that my LARGEST chunk of free space was 48MB.

I've seen far worse. The OS, whenever presented with new data to 
write to the drive, usually lets the drive lay it down in the largest 
blocks of unoccupied, contiguous memory allocation blocks, so, If I 
save some big Photoshop files and a few mp3s and text, all of a 
sudden my largest free block is way less than 48MB, and the next big 
write will be spread out in countless places all over the drive. Add 
to that the deleted files, which leave these little 'gaps' of 
allocation blocks, and it means that things are messy. And then, all 
it takes is a program to crash before writing its updated 
file//address locations to the drive's main Directory, or a flaky 
utility writing in the 'no-write' zone that the directory actually 
is... and what we have is a real mess.

An app makes a 'call' for a file, the OS looks up the 'name' in the 
Directory, and if the info in the directory differs from the actual 
location, things slow down, and slow more, and finally grind to a 
snail's pace when writing to an external drive, rebooting, etc. It 
just gets worse and worse, and meanwhile we're scratching our heads 
wondering what's the matter with this app, that drive, the 'new' 
update, etc, etc. The Directory fragments, and the files it keeps 
track of, by default, are written in an increasingly fragmented 
manner. Can you imagine Phooshop trying to do even a simple 'filter' 
process on a file that is in countless places, and having to, at the 
same time write the new file to even more locations in memory?  And 
the CPU and the Radeon card have to draw the changes in real time? 
messy.

Before my last de-frag routine my external Firewire drive was being 
written to at .3 to .5 MB per second... that's atrocious. After the 
defragging, it was back to 75 - 100 MB in 10 or 12 seconds, 
approximately, and that is a heckuva difference. Reboots sped up a 
bit also.

>I have had next to no problems with my PB, although I do want to 
>(eventually) offload everything and erase and fresh install my 
>system, as I am running an "Archive and Install" of Jaguar. With all 
>the SW I have to put back on my machine, this is not a very fun 
>thing to do.

I hear you on that. You say you're running on an "archive & Install", 
what, now? Do you still have your Previous Folder? If your apps are 
all running properly, ditch the Previous System.

If I had a nice big external drive [mine are all right to the brink 
of the "20%" figure] I'd be happy to take a day off and start over. 
:=)  You could partition the big external drive and dump all your 
apps and "Home" Folder into a small partition, wipe the internal 
drive, run the OSX Installer that you have,and then do the 10.2.4 
Combo update, and afterwards keep your Internal drive for the OS, 
Photoshop, and a few other things, and leave most of your other apps 
on the external. That way your internal drive would have lots of 
space for the Virtual memory from OS 9, and the Swap memry space for 
OSX [which the OS will 'take' anyway, and plenty of clean space for a 
'scratch' disk for P-Shop. matter of fact, setting up a little 3 - 5 
gigabyte partition on the internal, and selecting it as the primary 
'scratch' disk for P-Shop would be ideal.
>
>
>Thanks!
cheers,
~flipper