Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

1.5GB iBook annoyingly slow

TodVader

TodVader

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 27, 2005
596
0
Quebec, Canada
Hi.
After doing some iWeb+Safari and all my other apps, I bought a 1GB stick because it was pretty choppy with 768. After installing the new stick, I now have 1.5GB. When I type in iWeb, my letters still appear after i type them. The bigger the page (text wize), the more lag in letter appearance. IMO, it seems slower than before I upgraded the memory.

My PC has 256MB of ram and can do much more much faster.

While the letters lag in iWeb, I still have over 700MB free according to activity monitor. Before the ram upgrade, I was using pretty much all my memory (under 50MB left).

Is there some "time" which the new RAM readjusts itself in it's first boot? It does say 1.5GB in activity monitor. Is it possible that the ram doesn't actually work and I'm running 512MB?

Thanks
 
TodVader

TodVader

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 27, 2005
596
0
Quebec, Canada
Frontside bus speed makes the text appear after I type it? Last time I saw that, I was on my 90MHz 3/86 running Windows 95. After the RAM upgrade, everything is very smooth (safari, finder, etc) but the text lag is still there in iWeb when getting at 200-300 words or more.

I have tons of free memory so I guess you could be right but text lag IMO was something from the past, way past.
 
ryannel2003

ryannel2003

macrumors 68000
Jan 30, 2005
1,815
387
Greenville, NC
Front side bus speed has nothing to do with this. I had a 1.25GHz eMac with 512MB of RAM and it was never slow to the point of letters appearing after they had been typed. Same with my 1GHz iBook. Tell me, when is the last time you "cleaned" your hard drive? I know after a certain amount of time, OS X can become extremely slow. I would download a couple of programs (I used OnyX and it's great; can be downloaded for free) and that will clean up your computer. If that doesn't work, back up your work and reformat your system. This will help the speed of the computer tremendously.
 
Scarlet Fever

Scarlet Fever

macrumors 68040
Jul 22, 2005
3,262
0
Bookshop!
how much space do you have left on your HDD?

If you haven't done it in a while (3 years or so), back everything up and reformat. I've heard it can make a huge difference.
 
Virgil-TB2

Virgil-TB2

macrumors 65816
Aug 3, 2007
1,143
1
ryannel2003 said:
Front side bus speed has nothing to do with this. I had a 1.25GHz eMac with 512MB of RAM and it was never slow to the point of letters appearing after they had been typed. Same with my 1GHz iBook. Tell me, when is the last time you "cleaned" your hard drive? I know after a certain amount of time, OS X can become extremely slow. I would download a couple of programs (I used OnyX and it's great; can be downloaded for free) and that will clean up your computer. If that doesn't work, back up your work and reformat your system. This will help the speed of the computer tremendously.
Click to expand...
Yeah, this sounds like hard drive problems to me (at best).

Start by checking the S.M.A.R.T. status of the drive in the system profiler. If it's "failing" you need a new drive.

I have also seen this on old iBooks and even Powerbooks that have been used to death. A lot of users store *everything* on the desktop (like literally 80 Gigs of crap). That will bring almost anything to it's knees loading all that ***** up at boot time. Lots of others move stuff around and keep things in the "wrong" folders to the point where they have completely bunged up the system.

Another big suspect on the iBook (cause they are so old), is OS-9. I have resurrected quite a few old iBooks just by deleting every reference to the Classic OS on the drive. Many times the user upgrades their Mac again and again with "archive and install," and you end up with multiple system folders all over (OS 9 as well as X), which confuses the computer no end and also slows things to a crawl. Lots of folks also leave the default "load classic at boot" on even though they haven't used a classic app for years and the sub-systems are not even properly installed.

If you haven't ever completely wiped that drive and re-installed OS-X from scratch now is definitely the time to do it. And run some hardware checks on the drive as well. Use DiskWarrior 3.0 if you can get a copy.
 
TodVader

TodVader

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 27, 2005
596
0
Quebec, Canada
To answer all your questions, I have a 40GB HDD half full. I totally formatted and reinstalled when I upgraded to Leopard.

I will do the tests you guys mentioned and come back with the results tomorrow.

The computer works fine except the text lag.

My desktop has only one thing: Hard Drive. I never go to the desktop, I only use folders elsewhere.
 
TodVader

TodVader

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Sep 27, 2005
596
0
Quebec, Canada
paul.b.davis said:
is the text lag just in iWeb? because on my old PowerBook I had the same problem, but iWeb was the only thing affected
Click to expand...
Thanks for the tip. I just tested this in MS Word and put 10 times as much text as I would put in iWeb when it lags and it didn't lag. I also tested with text edit and it was perfect.

This seems more like a iWeb problem now...

I could call Apple but I'd rather solve this here.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom