[G4] Regular Disk & OS Maintenance?

[Anne Keller-Smith]

Hello All -

I have not been doing my regular maintenance very regularly, and may 
now be suffering from it. The Mac is a little flaky (a little slow, 
some spinning beach balls, Preview not wanting to open files the other 
day, had to force quit), and today the monitor just started flashing 
on/off, on/off. Uh, oh. I don't think it's the monitor because the 
mouse (a Targus fiber-optic one plugged into the keyboard USB port) was 
flashing on/off too.

I have a Diskwarrior update on order from Aldus, but that takes a 
couple weeks, so they say.

If it goes ga-ga again guess I'll call around and try to get a Techtool 
or Norton (would prefer the former) to see what's up.

I did boot up on the Jaguar CD to run Disk Utility both to fix 
permissions and do a disk repair. Don't know if the errors it found 
were serious or not. It did say "Disk Repaired."

Did not do Apple Hardware Test as the CD is old (2001) and came with 
original OS 10.1.1? Should do? Should d/l one from somewhere? Doesn't 
matter what OS because we are talking about hardware? Also did not do 
as would have to unplug everything and yank the internal memory card 
and PCI card (ugh) but will do if you guys say I must.

What should I be doing on a regular basis? Using my Macjanitor MORE 
often, I would think - daily? weekly?

Using Diskwarrior every month?

What do you all do?

If the drive crashes altogether, well, it's a 4-year-old computer, 
it'll be time for a new one. Files all backed up pretty much daily. So 
it wouldn't be too bad.

All advice and even wagging tongues invited and gratefully received.

P.S.: Does it sound like a kernal panic? I haven't had one of those 
since I installed Jaguar so have sort of forgotten what they are like. 
Don't they involve scrolling shell commands on screen? This was none of 
those, it seemed like the computer thought it was a neon light for an 
inner city hotel.

Anne Keller Smith
Down to Earth Web Design
G4 733mHz (OS X 10.2.8)
896 MB RAM, 40 GB hard drive
mailto:earthpigz at earthlink.net
http://www.downtoearthweb.com