After 4 years, iBook running slow

hooch said:

Hi all,

I have had my iBook for a good 4 years now. I have a 1.2ghz G4 ppc running Tiger and it is starting to run slow. I noticed that videos will now pause if something else is running or downloading. This never happened before. I was thinking about reinstalling my OS but would like to avoid that. Does anyone have this same problem or have any tricks to speed this up again?

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A lot of videos you find on the Internet today are encoded in much more processor-intensive (but smaller) video codecs that were not around 4 years ago. Your computer is likely not slowing down. It just isn't keeping up with new video technology.

You only mentioned video here - so it is a video-only problem, or is the entire system somewhat sluggish? I don't see any reason a 1.2ghz processor cannot efficiently play today's videos.

If you aren't already maxed-out on RAM, installing more should help a bit.

Though if it is just video, it may be something as small as a bad installation of a video player, codec, etc.

Esenthiel said:

I don't see any reason a 1.2ghz processor cannot efficiently play today's videos.

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I can think of reasons. H.264 encoding. HD video. Running video with either of these characteristics (or even worse, both) and other apps as well will surely cause a slow down on that system.

As weird as this sounds, try removing duplicate fonts. I di it with the GF's iBook and it worked wonders.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031025010930633

Above is a link to read up on it, I think there is a posting in Apple Discussions also.

go to applications/font book open it and any fonts that have bullets on the right (not triangles on the left) can be safely deleted. Hers was loaded with dupes.

Hope this helps.

I didn't knonw that 1.2ghz G4's were made in late 2002? I believe that was still the time of the G3 iBooks.

From my calculations, the 1.2ghz machines first came out in 2004.

Anyway, get a bigger faster harddrive -- I recommend that 100gb Travelstar 7200rpm. Then max out your ram. While you have the ibook open, you might as well drop in a new dvd burning superdrive.

Kamikaze said:

As weird as this sounds, try removing duplicate fonts. I di it with the GF's iBook and it worked wonders.
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20031025010930633

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Do duplicate fonts slow down the OS?

My 3.5 year old 867MHz PB started to slow just recently in just about everything it did. Sometimes applications or other things would just take for ever, and you would hear the HDD (if it was in a quiet room) keep chugging repeatedly on something. So I replaced the HDD and it's like new again. Hopefully it's not your HDD, but if it is, replacing the one in my
PB was not that hard or time consuming. http://www.ifixit.com has an excellent manual.

dpaanlka said:

I can think of reasons. H.264 encoding. HD video. Running video with either of these characteristics (or even worse, both) and other apps as well will surely cause a slow down on that system.

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Sure, but those formats are, by and large, far from the most commonly found on the internet.

4 years ago, G4 iBooks didn't exist The 12" 1.2Ghz iBook came out just before the last revision 1.33Ghz iBook, which came out in late 2005