We'll discuss it more in depth in an upcoming MacTip series on maintenance. Fragmentation refers to the physical segmenting of files on your hard drive. This means that your hard drive must go to 2 places to read the entire file instead of just one. With files that are constantly being added to and deleted from this fragmentation can decrease the performance of your Mac. A few weeks ago I optimized my Duo.
Optimization is the process of eliminating fragmentation.
I found that the two files that contain my email were segmented into over 800 separate pieces. After I optimized my hard drive those files were all in one contiguous space on my drive and using my email program moved along much faster. I know whether or not to use Speed Doubler has become a charged issue in some circles. Speed Doubler does a number of things that will improve the performance of your PowerMac. Including making your cache work more intelligently and making some operations of the Mac OS work faster by patching over the code from Apple and replacing it with code more suited to PowerMacs.