Lee,
VERY interesting, thanks so much. I don't use virus software and
sometimes wonder if I am walking a tightrope, and I don't degrag but
about once a year. If the system does begin to act weird then
running DiskWarrior solves everything and there has been little need
to defrag.
Thanks for the education.
John
On Jan 27, 2008, at 8:41 PM, Lee Larson wrote:
On Jan 27, 2008, at 6:56 PM, Nora J. Probasco wrote:
What is the best antivirus software to buy to use with Leopard? I
used to only use Norton but am not very happy with them at the
moment. Any other suggestions? I would also like to get a program
similar to Norton that defrags and optimizes the disk. Does Disk
Warrior do that? Or what is the best software for that? I’ve got
to take care of my new laptop when I get it.
I get the feeling that I have a minority point of view around here
when I say that I don't use any antivirus programs and I never
defragment my drives. Perhaps I'm living dangerously, but here's my
logic.
Despite the relentless propaganda to the contrary from sources such
as Symantec and McAfee, it just doesn't seem like there's much of a
virus problem on the Mac. Most of the problems seem to be social
engineering exploits where infection comes after a naive user
invites trouble by doing something dumb. Until I see a real
problem, I refuse to compromise my system performance by installing
unnecessary and invasive system patches.
As for defragmenting, I believe that for most people it just isn't
necessary. Besides laziness, here are some of the reasons I don't
bother:
• Drives are so much bigger these days that for a file of normal
size it's rare that it can't be written in one big squirt. This may
not be true for those always messing with video editing, but for
most of us it's true.
• Modern drives are so much faster and have so much larger RAM
caches than those of the past that programs like word processors
don't work by appending little pieces to the ends of files any
more; they just write the whole file at every save. This means it's
unlikely such files ever get fragmented. The larger RAM caches also
mean fragmentation makes much less difference when reading files
because often-used information is probably already cached and the
drives have lots of logic on board to predict reads and writes
ahead of time.
• Mac OS X uses a technique called "hot file adaptive clustering"
that automatically defragments slowly growing files.
• On a properly installed Unix system the file optimizers that move
things around can often do more harm than good because Unix systems
use tens of thousands of small files and the optimizer rarely knows
the best place to put them. I trust the folks who wrote the Mac OS
X installer more than the people at Symantec to know which files
should live in the hot bands.
_______________________________________________
The next Louisville Computer Society meeting will
be February 26 at MacAuthority, 128 Breckinridge Lane.
Posting address: [email protected]
Information: http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
_______________________________________________
The next Louisville Computer Society meeting will
be February 26 at MacAuthority, 128 Breckinridge Lane.
Posting address: [email protected]
Information: http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
