more questions from mac newbie

[willypct]

just curious what the **** is crons ? and how does mac janitor works do they do what system mechanic or norton syst works do on a pc.?
also do macs running on osx panther need defragmenting ?
do i have to worry about spyware?

 

[rman]

Okay, let us make a long story short.

What is cron. cron is a process that is running all the time. Time of it as a clock that keeps tracks of other processes that need to be run at a certain time. macjanitor is an application that has a gui front to several of the shell scripts that cron run. Normally if you systems is running 24 hours straight with putting it to sleep. Several processes will run automatically via the cron daemon. An example of this is the weekly shell script. Which is used to roll over the error log once a week. macjanitor is used in running the three shell scripts daily, weekly, and monthly. As for defrag the system disk, if you are running disk journaling (which I think is on by default) you should not have to worry about defraging the disk. If you are using one off the other Apple type file systems instead of the unix type file system you might need to.

I believe you should only need to worry about defraging on your data partition and not your system partition.