Uh, I’m?I’m not quite dead, sir

Today – no, strike that – Sunday, I embarked on a glorious quest. A quest to optimize my faithful and trusty G4 Cube’s disk.

Having been emboldened by relatively recent success in updating the firmware on my 60 GB disk, in which no bits or bytes were lost, I decided it’s high time I do something to rearrange said bits and bytes into an order more conducive to efficient use.

And, um, I’ve given up patience for the moment. Two overnight sessions of defragmentation have yielded about 50% complete each time. I’m not sure if iDefrag is running out of memory (physical or virtual), or if the current arrangement on the disk is just too complex for my poor little 500 MHz G4 to solve in finite time. It does shut down cleanly, so I know it’s not hung. This leads me to conclude that it’s simply out to lunch thinking about its next move. However, taking lunch at 8 a.m. is decidedly uncouth, and I’ve no regrets about telling my computer that it ought to start eating on a more normal schedule.

“Now, what does this all have to do with iPods,” you ask? Well, I was just getting to that. You see, when one is trying to formulate a plan of attack with which to trick the computer into cooperating, you need to get it busy doing something else that it can accomplish. In this case, something else is optimizing the disk of my beloved iPod mini. I hope to accomplish either persuading my hard working but barely sufficient G4 that it possesses the necessary resources to actually complete the optimization, or to trick it by performing the compact and optimize steps separately.

So, the grand experiment is on. One thing that I’m particularly interested in knowing is whether my iPod runs a little more smoothly after this operation. I’ll let you know.

Oh, and uh, I?I think I could pull through, sir.

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