Discussions about best disk utilities, like the ongoing Duolist thread, are always worthwhile. For Kate and those really interested, there was an excellent and exhaustive forum on Macfixit about 6 months ago. There were about 90 posts and about 9000 quick votes. My own opinion came about 80% of the way into the thread and is reposted below (opinions were influenced by the way in which the questions were posed). Check out: http://www.macfixit.com/ultimate/Forum21/HTML/000031.html "" posted 11-19-2000 on MacFixIt Despite all the fine posts, I still have a bit to add. I've used most versions to (near) current of DFA, MacTools, NDD/NUM, TTP and DW. I do not run any TTP or NUM extensions except Disk Light which has been stable for me and useful to know which drive is running. Over the years DFA has gotten more robust and better at what it does. Like many others, I'll use DFA for light duty checks (more as a diagnostic) but it chokes on more challenging problems. DISK REPAIR My unquestionable favorite by a wide margin is DW, but it still would not be my 1st choice as SOLE disk repair utility because there are times when a drive will not even mount on the desktop at all. In such a case DW is helpless. Factors of choice really boil down to a mix of reliability, speed, versatility, and need/type of use. I work multiple drives in my G3-6 slot tower pretty hard and carry a 30 gb drive in a G3-Powerbook, all with multiple partitions. DW has revived drives where no other utility could. Generally, if a drive doesn't boot and it is not SCSI voodoo, I'll go straight to DW. The only times DW has failed is where the drive itself has failed in hardware or doesn't mount. NUM has been much maligned but with v.4 & 5 in the last 2 years that's probably unfair now. After Symantec took over Central Point and killed off MacTools, NUM 3.xx went through a bad patch (I, too, found it miserable, especially for irreparably cross-threading files) which hurt its reputation, damaging user confidence that lingers into today. Throughout that time, Apple wasn't doing so well either with the changeover to IDE drives, new disk drivers, and rapid changes in system versions, innumerable enablers and platforms. So I do not entirely blame NUM. Since v.4, I've again found NUM the best mix between speed, versatility and effectiveness. If my disk repair arsenal was limited to one, NUM would be my all-round choice. It is far and away the best utility for mounting "unmountable" or "reluctant" partitions/drives. This is a highly advantageous and underrated capability where NUM truly shines. Usually after getting a "dead" drive up, I switch immediately to DW. TTP is arguably thorough but too slow for my tastes. I'll take a little "risk" with my "impatience". TTP did write out bad sectors in some older drives which NUM was choking on and did identify a bad ram module that worked under OS8.51 but not OS8.6. I use TTP to verify/check DW or NUM (only if the latter still show problems) but it's never my first choice due to its slowness. It's fun to use TTP to check technical aspects of one's computer. If I have flaky System performance after hard crashes/freezes, rather than do a full clean install, I'll copy the System & Finder from a clean install folder residing on a reserve partition into my primary boot folder, after dragging out the old ones. This is certainly not what experts or Apple recommend but it's quick and dirty, effective, especially if you want to preserve a few "tweaks" made to the System file or save a lot of time. DISK OPTIMIZATION I used Alsoft's PlusMaker/Maximizer to migrate to HFS+ a few years back but my (new, unused)DiskExpress Pro is inexplicably yet not HFS+ compatible and remains a dud. Curiously Alsoft has never updated it and does not offer hapless users any remedy. However, I've always been happy with NUM/Speed Disk. It does the job much faster than TTP (which requires more free disk space and free contiguous space) and has never given any problem in any version. In fairness DW, NUM, and TTP all have their unique capabilities. Each is invaluable when you really need their special strengths. "" On anti-virus, I'm also one who much prefers Virex to NAV, but I have both. A good preventative arsenal never hurts. I'd resort to NAV if I felt Virex (much less intrusive) didn't finish the job. BTW make sure whatever utilities are chosen match the OS they were designed for. Disk utilities can mess up drives badly if running old(er) versions on new(er) systems. It's usually "mismatches" which give utilities a bad name. --- Sidney Ho ---------- Duo/2400 List, The friendliest place on the Net! A listserv for users and fans of Mac subportables. 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