[Sean Alter]

My first post here as I am a newbe:
I have recently started to burn dvd's but hear that dvd burning on a ibook or any other laptop is a bad idea because of excessive heat which could fry the motherboard someday. Is there any truth to this? If so why to they sell an ibook with a superdrive?
-Also, should I defrag my hard drive? Or is this just for windows systems?
- Whats the difference between "Empty trash" and "Secure trash" does secure completely get rid of the item and emtpy only get rid of part of the item. Thank you.

[sminch]

hey sean, welcome...

i haven't heard anything about dvd burning damaging a laptop, which isn't to say that such stories are necessarily a load of bollocks or anything, but as you say - why would they sell dvd burner equipped laptops if they were going to overheat and die? sounds a bit stoopid to me, and hey, if it does die you've got your warranty. surely it's pretty much identical to burning a cd though, right?

as far as defragging goes, os x does this on the fly so it's not something you need to worry about at all. sweet.

empty trash deletes the file as per usual, which is to say that it deletes the data telling the computer that the file exists - the file's data is still there and will be overwritten sooner or later, but the 0s and 1s haven't changed so if someone wants to hunt through your hd they will find it. secure delete deletes it and also overwrites it, so it can't be found again. useful for, er, sensitive files.

good luck with your mac!

sminch

[ghporter]

The term "burn" is a bit over the top. A laser does heat tiny spots on the disc, but the additional heat in the overall system is negligable. I have NEVER heard of an internal drive overheating and thus damaging a logic board on any laptop of any brand. I think you've heard from people who killed their computers somehow and blamed it on their optical drives.

MacOS handles drive space issues differently from the way Windows does, so the constant need to watch fragmentation you have with a Win box is not an issue with a Mac. You can defragment the drive if you want (usually with a third-party utility that does a lot of other stuff for you too), but for most users it's not really something to worry about.

Secure Trash Deletion completely eliminates the file, leaving nothing to recover-and recovering the disk space used by the deleted file too! When you Secure Delete, it seems to securely delete even stuff you'd "emptied" from the trash earlier, so it may take some time to finish.