(no subject)

[sanpaku_backup]

Tech support told me to run DiskWarrior on the iMac first... and whaddaya know, it worked. The iMac's "dark matter" memory problem is gone and I have a nice 4.67 Gig to play around with, cause for celebration and definitely making the cost of the program worthwhile. The iBook was optimized as well, which is lovely, but there doesn't seem to be any more hard disk memory available. And the weird problems persist: machine will crash if it goes to sleep, on startup it opens up the console, etc.

So I think I will use my new powers to toss the Previous System folders and anything else that takes up serious space on the drive. (I found an old copy of Stronghold on there, for example, that was three quarters of a Gig all by itself.) A guy from the shul loaned me a nice 160 Gig portable hard drive and I'm busily using Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the whole thing, though really it's only necessary to do that if I want to do a wipe, which I now no longer think I need to do. Once all this is done I will probably reinstall to 10.3.8 and rerun DiskWarrior and then hope that my problems are over for a little while.

The in-for-a-dime problem is definitely there with the iBook. It was really built with too little internal memory to handle OS X. So, even though it is a pain and not something I use that often, I should probably spend the hunnert bucks or so to buy 512 MB of internal memory for it, and then hopefully, probably, it won't give me any more trouble. I'll keep both of these guys tuned nicely with DiskWarrior. If I'm lucky, I'll go another year or so without needing a new system. 6 years is about all you can expect from a computer, especially one you use all day, every day.

Comments

[hydrozoa.livejournal.com]

nice. diskwarrior's been recommended to me for my busted-ass imac but i've been scared cos the site says it sometimes doesn't work. you've encouraged me greatly.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

What's happening with the iMac? I only came across DiskWarrior because I went through the Apple steps for diagnosing through the console and got all these messages about overlapping sectors. So if it's a fragmentation problem, DiskWarrior's supposed to be the best.

I was definitely worried it wouldn't work and almost ready to write it off. Expensive, too. But their tech support is like one guy -- like you call him and he says "hello" and you discuss what's happening to your computer. So that was really cool.

[laurens10.livejournal.com]

I have 512MB of memory for my little iBook and it does it's thing like a champ. It's probably a more recent model though.

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is a Dual USB version from mid-'02, and they were selling 'em with 128 MB. It seems abundantly clear to me now that OS X really, really needs the extra memory or there will be problems. I should have bought it that way from the get-go. Ah well. Live and learn.

[librarygrrl.livejournal.com]

6 years is about 3 years of borrowed time, friend. Planned obsolescence is down to 3 years max. You totally can't complain about a 6-year old machine giving you trouble!