Disk utility no longer working, any alternative HDD maintenance prog?

Hi all,
I have an early 2003 Powerbook G4 12" aluminium. 80Gb HDD with about 4.5Gb free. It's running very slowly but I hardly tax the machine so I'm not too bothered, but I tried to run Disk Utility to make sure everything was ok and it couldnt even verify permissions. It said it might take several minutes to run the permissions, but after 20+ minutes I gave up.
Is there any alternative free program that'll check all the important bits and make sure things are fine?
I used to use OS9 and ran things like Techtool lite and Norton speedtools; zapping the PRAM, optimising the drive and that sort of thing. I get the feeling the HDD on this powerbook is fragmented to ****, but then I didn't think Macs slowed down from such things like a PC.
But its made me realise I don't have any kind of housekeeping tools to keep my now OSX machines running (those being the G4 powerbook and a Quicksilver G4, running Leopard and Tiger respectively).
Many thanks for any help.

Are you running Disk Utility using your Tiger install DVD? If not, you need to.
Another popular utility is Disk Warrior (more powerful than DiskUtility), however, it costs about $100.
You don't have enough free space on your hard drive as it is typically recommended to have 10-15% free.
Mac OS X: System maintenance
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=607640
Mac Tune-up: 34 Software Speedups
http://www.macworld.com/article/49489/2006/02/softwarespeed.html
52 Ways to Speed Up OS X
http://www.imafish.co.uk/articles/post/articles/130/52-ways-to-speed-up os-x/
Tuning Mac OS X Performance
http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/performance.html
11 Ways to Optimize Your Mac's Performance
http://lowendmac.com/eubanks/07/0312.html
The Top 7 Free Utilities To Maintain A Mac.
http://mac360.com/index.php/mac360/comments/the_top_7_free_utilities_to_maintain _a_mac/
 Cheers, Tom

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