Why is this? Widgets slow down.

Umm, if you're talking about widget icons in the Dashboard dock, do you realize when you continually click those icons, you open multiple instances of that widget? It has nothing to do with graphics and everything to do with eating up memory, CPU cycles and all that good stuff.

If I click on a widget over and over again on my PowerBook (see sig), which is much slower than your PowerMac, the ripple effect gets jerky and stutters, but overall things don't really slow down. I still end up with a bunch of instances of that widget, and they're up and running as quickly as I would expect. That ripple effect is pretty hard on the GPU, as you may know it doesn't even work on current iBooks and Mac minis because the graphics card in them isn't powerful enough. I don't see it as a problem, because after all that effect is only there to look cool. It doesn't really serve much of a meaningful purpose. I'd rather have it slow down and get jerky than have the computer itself slow down when opening a bunch of widgets. Of course, I'm not sure why you'd want to open a bunch of copies of the same widget at the same time anyway.

I've got an 800 MHz Pentium III in front of me. Since getting my PowerBook, I turn it on maybe once every 2 weeks if it's lucky . I also have a dual 1.8 GHz PowerMac G5, and it's amazing. I can't imagine a dual 2.3 or dual 2.7!