[X Newbies] Flaky Input

[Randy B. Singer]

Chris Walker said:

>Since we have strayed into the area of disk Utilities, what would you
>suggest as the best one to use for de-fragging a Disk.  DiskWarrior is OK
>for rebuilding directories, but not for optimisation and I believe Norton
>is no longer being produced.  This would suggest TechTool Pro as being
>the sole remaining optimisation utility, but is it reliable?

Norton utilities is still available, and it will continue to be supported 
for OS X 10.3 Panther, but not for future versions of the Mac OS. 
SpeedDisk might be the best way to go if you could get a copy of Norton 
Utilities inexpensively, and you could resist installing the other 
components of NU on your hard drive.
See:
http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=20360224&loc=

I can't recommend Alsoft's Plus Optimizer because it hasn't been updated 
since 2001, it needs to boot into OS 9 to run, and from what I have heard 
from users, and from my own experience (it won't even attempt to 
defragment my hard drive running OS X), I worry that, while it is OS 
X-compatible that it isn't particularly OS X-savvy.

That leaves:

INTECH SPEED TOOLS
http://www.intechusa.com/

TECHTOOL PRO
http://www.micromat.com/tt_pro_4/tt_pro_4.html

DRIVE 10
http://www.micromat.com/drive_10/drive_10_introduction.html

I own and have used TechTool Pro, and it seems to work fine.  I don't 
enough about the other two to make a recommendation one way or the other.


Randy B. Singer
Co-Author of: The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th and 6th editions)

How To Deal With Common OS X 10.3 Panther Problems
http://www.macattorney.com/panther.html