Software for 10.4 on G5

Question

Hi all. I'm thinking of buying an iMac G5 that has 10.4 (Tiger) on it, and have a few questions. The guy wants 750 for it.
I think the model is the one with the Ambient Light Sensor (the owner is not sure what he has). I know that particular model had a problem with overheating due to cheap capacitors. Has anyone else had this problem, and how would I check on it ? Can I open it up and how would I do that?
Also... I need to know if I can run Diskwarrior, Macwasher, and Diskwarrior's File Optimizer (for defraging) on 10.4.
Hope I haven't overwhelmed you with all these questions.
Thanks,
Philip Shill

Answer 1

By way of example, Philip, one simple way of "defragmenting" your internal drive is to simply "clone" (ie make an exact copy of your drive) on an external hard drive, wipe your internal drive, and then "clone" back from the external to the internal. This will result in the contents of the drive being copied in one contiguous block, with the files and free space defragmented, without the need to use a defragmentation/ optmisation utility.
The fact that OSX has its own defragmentation routines for smaller files also helps in the process. While fragmentation can still occur it is less of an issue now than it was under OS9.
Furthermore, if you suffer a major problem on your internal hard drive then having a bootable backup on a firewire drive saves an awful lot of worry . Even if the internal drive fails completely then you will not have lost your data (or, at least, only a very small amount of it - it is very easy to schedule something like "SuperDuper" to back up your machine automatically every night, for example.)
Things like the "journalling" system under recent versions of MacOSX make directory problems generally less of an issue than they were underOS9, too (*although they can still happen, of course).
As I said, now that external firewire hard drives of sufficient size can be had for less than the price of a utility like DiskWarrior or TechTools and the like the priorities have changed. For years I used to recommend that the first thing people bought after they purchased their Mac was a utility like DiskWarrior in case of emergencies. These days an external hard drive is cheap enough to be used for emergency recovery instead, and can be used for other things too.
OSX is generally much more robust than OS 9. Programs are less likely to crash when you are using it, and, when they do, it is less likely to crash the entire computer in the process, because it uses "protected memory" for each application. Generally you can simply "force quit" the problem program and go on to save any work in other programs that you have open, rather than the whole lot going down in one great catastrophe.
So, the priorities have changed. We used to urgently need good recovery and maintenance utilities, because crashes were more frequent, fragmentation was more of a problem, and most of us couldn't afford large "backup" drives. Today most of us can get by with a good external backup and simply use Apple's own "Disk Utility" (which is significantly more powerful than the old "Disk First Aid" that came with OS9 ) for basic maintenance tasks.
Hope that makes sense.
Cheers
Rod