Utilities to run on ibook

[Ian Sidle]

Yeah. The overall conscientious is that norton sucks. Back in the day, 
before it was bought out by symantec, when it was actually made by an 
guy named norton, it was really good. Although over time it has rotted 
away. It generally causes more problems then it fixes.  I pretty much 
leave it as an "last ditch" option. There has been an few stories where 
it saved someone on an blue moon, but its more often not. I am not deep 
into the windows community, but I have heard similar horror stories 
from people using the windows version too.

Drive 10 - ugg, what a piece of junk :(. I bought it at macworld at 
version 1 and it did next to nothing. Never came up with any 
error/warning messages about anything [while DW was bouncing off the 
wall] and was slow as molasses. Not to mention you had to pay to 
upgrade to work with the next os version (10.2?) which was the last 
straw for me. Might have improved now, but I would just go straight to 
tech tools. They made it sound like it was gonna be TT (which is good) 
but it wasn't. The main benefit back then was it was the only program 
that was os x native, but that only helps if you have multiple hard 
disks/partitions. Disk-warrior and Tech-Tool's are now  os x native, so 
that advantage is gone.

I have not tried the new version of TT yet, didn't know it came out. 
3.0 was excellent as an "swiss army knife/everything in the universe in 
one program" utility.  Not as good as DW in catalog, but nothing to be 
sad about and certainly gets everything else. TT does an more then just 
fix hard drives - it also checks hardware components  as well.

Disk Utilities/Disk first aid/fsck -  Most people ignore this one 
because it comes free with the os. Its excellent at fixing (little) 
problems and repairing permissions.  At times it will say that the 
problems are too much for it and so I will then boot into DW. You can 
be assured, when this little guy fixes something it will not make 
things worse.

So My primary suggestion is to get disk warrior and call it done. I am 
surprised that the majority/95% of the problems are file system/catalog 
related not damage to the disk/files themselves.  If you want to save 
an few dollar's, you can go an get the old version (2.1) off ebay. It 
has always been compatible with os x drives (vs the others that needed 
updates). You just need to boot off the cd into os 9 to use it, but you 
will have to anyway with only one hard-drive in the ibook.

FYI - the 3.0 has both the new os x and the old 2.1 os 9 version with 
boot-able system folders.

Thanks,
Ian Sidle