Do I have to defragmentate the (internal) hard disk of my G3, just like pc people have to do? If so, how do I do it, if not, why not?

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I'm sure there will be those who disagree, but everything I've read suggests that defragmenting is highly overrated. The amount of time spent defragging vastly outweighs the performance gains, which seem to be more theoretical than real on good, modern drives. Ted Landau, who wrote the leading Mac maintenance and troubleshooting book ("Sad Macs . . ."), says that he only defragments once a year, and even then he's not sure that it serves any purpose - he just does it because it can be done. I've done it a number of times on a 60 GB drive with many multimedia files, and noticed no difference in performance. As soon as you're done defragmenting, the drive starts fragmenting all over again.

It's overkill, like creating 15 partitions on your drive. You end up spending more time maintaining your computer than enjoying your computer.

That said, it does no apparent harm, and you can do it while you're busy doing something else. TechTool Pro3 and Norton Utilities both have defrag/optimize features. But I wouldn't spend $100, or even $10, just to have a defragger. Based on my experience, I wouldn't even worry about it.

I agree with Zigzag. However, TechTool and Norton Utilities do have other benefits that are worthwhile. If you find that you can benefit in other ways from those programs, go ahead and get them. Run the optimization program if you want, or don't. It doesn't really matter. I run mine not even once a year. When I do, I'm usually not more than 1 or 2% fragmented. That's after a lot of moving stuff to and from my drives.