[HM] Re: Clean-up v. new computer

[Duane Murphy]

--- At Sun, 8 Dec 2002 15:32:18 -0500, Bill Wyman wrote:

>i'm surprised at how many people open and quit programs throughout 
>the day where i work. (most suprising tip i give people: the 
>apple-tab key, which cycles through your open programs. people who 
>don't konw that will as an alternative shut all their open browser 
>windows, for example, or simply quit out of it, to get to word or 
>whatever.)

Agreed. Sometimes its hard to see the forest for the trees. Some other
useful things to do. I seldom quit applications.

- Drag/tear off the application menu (on the right) and turn it into a
floating window. If you zoom it (or some other control) you can make it
into small icons only. This makes it very easy to click between
applications and reminds you what is already running. As an alternative
there are several extensions that provide similer functionality.

- Hide an application. You can select it from the application menu or
press option when clicking to another application window (or the Finder
desktop). This will switch and hide the previous application. I use this
a lot.

>i'm not a technician but in my anecdotal experience those people have 
>lots of crashing problems. (this is all applicable to os9 only.) if 
>you have that much ram, you should be able to give IE or n'scape 20 
>or 30 mb's of ram. 

Indeed, I use netscape and set its partition very high: 20M. The problem
with browsers is the plug-ins. There's no telling how much more memory
each plug-in is going to need.

>the experts can tell us if this makes sense, but i 
>have all my programs in the startup folder, with the biggest ones set 
>to open first. (put a space before the name of n'scape, IE, word, 
>whatever mail program you use etc. to made that happen.) then, leave 
>them alone through the day; don't quit out of them, and you should be 
>ok, if that was indeed your problem.

I suppose if you always use one set of applications all the time, this is
probably fine. Word of warning. Unlike OS/X, OS/9 uses coopertive
multitasking. What this means is that every running application has to
let other applications have time to do work. The flip side of this is
that every application gets time to do work, even if there is nothing for
it to do. Running lots of applications that are doing nothing can (in the
extreme case) cause the application you're working on to slow down.

>also, rebuild your desktop occasionally, which eliminates many 
>problems as well.

Rebuilding your desktop is often sighted as a fix. Rebuilding your
desktop does rebuilds the database that associates documents with
applications. That's it. Nothing special. If you are oddly having trouble
with applications launching when you're opening documents, then
rebuilding the desktop may help.

A more useful periodic repair is to run Disk First Aid or your favorite
disk utility. This will ensure that your file system is in good working order.

 ...Duane