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From: phaedrus@milton.u.washington.edu (Mark Phaedrus)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
Subject: Re: Desktop Manager
Message-ID: <10458@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 2 Nov 90 01:52:19 GMT
References: <1990Oct30.163628.900@fog.ann-arbor.mi.us> <1990Oct31.220114.14952@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> <1286@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 27

In article <1286@skye.cs.ed.ac.uk> nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk writes:
>My question: what are all these disk optimisers and defragmenters going
>to do when we're running Desktop Manager all the time, with its files
>open all the time, under MultiFinder all the time?

     All the disk optimizers I've seen don't work with DM running.  The only
way around this I've found is to disable the Desktop Manager INIT, restart,
optimize, and reenable the INIT.  (Hopefully, Apple will provide a more
elegant solution for System 7.)
     This does bring up another question.  Once you've installed Desktop
Manager and rebuilt the desktop so that Desktop DB and DF are created, it's
tempting to just delete Desktop to free up space on the disk.  If you do this,
though, the first time you start up without DM, you'll have to wait ~4.6 years
for the Finder to rebuild the Desktop file for each of your hard disk
partitions.
     Someone once showed me a clever trick to get around this: Instead of
deleting Desktop, initialize a floppy disk, and copy the Desktop file from the
floppy onto each of your hard disk partitions.  This miniature Desktop only
takes about 5K, and if you ever have to work without DM, Finder will only
take the time to rebuild the Desktop information for windows you actually have
open.


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