Four Hot Tips to Improve Your Mac



Author: Mitchell Kasdin, BMUG

Date: October November, 1992

Keywords: upgrade norton utilities mactools fragmentation

Text:
If you are like most Mac users, you spend a fair amount of time in
front of your computer, but how well do you know your Mac? Does it have
a name? Does it sit, stay, and fetch on command, or does it eat your
files at the most in-opportune times? Certainly we have all experienced
these frustrations, but wouldn't it be nice if your Mac went to
obedience school and listened like a well-trained Golden Retriever?
Below is a list of items that you should purchase to teach your old Mac
new tricks.
Sooner or later you will need to use Norton Utilities or MacTools. Not
only can the programs recover irretrievably lost data on your floppy or
hard drive, restore your hard drive, prevent accidental erasure, and
search a 40 meg hard drive in under 5 seconds, but it can also optimize
your hard drive.
Each time you copy, delete or move a file your computer writes onto
various sectors of your hard drive. In time, files become fragmented, a
section here and a section there. This means that the application needs
to search through your hard disk to find all the pieces. Fortunately,
either of these programs can maximize the performance of your hard
drive by putting all the files together. Typically, the System Folder
is at the beginning and unused hard disk space is in one contiguous
unit. This is essential for anyone using virtual memory under System 7.
While we are on the subject of disk space I should also recommend Disk
Doubler by Salient Software, which auto-matically compresses and
expands all your files. Whether it is a HyperCard stack, a text
document, or a spreadsheet it will compress it. After using the
software for over one year I have never experienced any difficulties.
The software expands and decompresses files very quickly, runs
automatically once the INIT is installed, and frees megabyte upon
megabyte of disk space. Typically, it will reduce files to less than
50% of the original size, and on one occasion I reduced a 6 meg
Pagemaker document to 1.5 megs. Hey, don't take my word for it, go out
and try it for yourself.

Copyright © october november, 1992 by Mitchell Kasdin, BMUG