OS X is built on top of BSD. As far as I know, the file system (journaled HFS+) coupled with OS X does not need to be defragmented - it is a process that happens automatically in the background. Perhaps others can clarify?

I bought Disk Warrior, and after using it 4 times, I would get a warning notice that to successfully replace the rebuilt directories, without the possible loss of everything (in case of a power disruption), I must free up 98mb of contiguous space on my hard drive. I have an eMac 1 gig, 40 Gb with 1Gb ram and less than half the hard drive used. Nobody could tell me how to do such. Alsoft, Disk Warrior's maker, said they were coming out with an optimizer for OS 10.3.5, they alredy have one for earlier OS's. They said that would fix the problem. I finally found an Apple support tech that said to delete contiguous space, just delete (after saving to another medium or external hard drive) a folder or some application that occupies at least The amount of space required. She too told me that defragmentation/optimization runs in the background. I deleted 358mb of mpegs. That worked. Now I just run a free optimization utility, called OnyX that I found on Apple's site. So, though I could be wrong, it seems from Alsoft telling me the system needed to be optimized, the background optimization doesn't always clean up as it's supposed to. I also use another free utility, Mac Janitor regulary. Every day sometimes. That speeds my machine back up.
Hope this helps.
Dan

Hello,

Whatever you do, do not run old Norton Utilities from OS 9 and have it churn your OS X system. It can destroy it. Just not a good thing to do. Do not boot into OS 9 and run it either. Of you run OS X on any volume, you need OS X tools to work with it.

There are discussions if you should optimize your disk or not. I like the idea of a good optimizing once in a while.

Christian

The skinny on why you do or do not need to defrag a hard drive, straight from the horse's mouth.

There is no defrag option on osx.
I would just reinstall osx operating system on the machine.

Of course till 2008 there was no option for users to defrag Mac drive but Now we have a third party tool - Stellar Drive Defrag to defrag Mac disk.

With this tool we can defrag

1. A partition
2. A particular large file
3. Entire Mac disk


This also provides an option to optimize free spaces on Mac drive.

Hello altogether,

basically, modern filesystems like HFS+ don't need to be defracmented. And nevertheless, that shouldn't be the bottleneck of you problem as far as I can see.

Why do you want to use Norton? It's well known that it's slow and very much out of date.

When you have an old computer, Mac OS X is simply to heavy for it. Version 5 (Leopard) needed around 500 MB of RAM just for the system.
What you could try is to reduce all system tools to a minimum (look in the net).

Scan your disk with disk-utilities (or whatever it's called under 10.2) and try to figure out the problem with your tif-files. Maybe they're damaged instead of the partition. If all fails, you shoud think of formatting and reinstalling the system completely as stevenros suggested.

For a good device, go into your system-monitor and look which programme uses most ressources. You can then backcheck the internet if you need that tool or how it can be reduced.

Hope that helps a bit, Simon