Optimization tips for Power Mac G4 MDD?

Put Tiger or Leopard on it.
Use Onyx and the Secrets .prepane to remove slow animations and excess eye candy.
Use XSlimmer to free up disk space by removing foreign languages from software (and maybe the Intel code too.)

Also, trimthefat, monolingual.

LOLZpersonok said:

It already has Tiger, it says in my Signature.

I kinda got around to trying your tips today only to find that it now gives me a Kernel Panic just before it hits the logon screen. I can't get it to boot without extensions or into safe mode. Always the same thing. I did nothing to modify it prior. It kinda just started this. Please help me!

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What tips of his did you try?

LOLZpersonok said:

I kinda got around to trying your tips today only to find that it now gives me a Kernel Panic just before it hits the logon screen. I can't get it to boot without extensions or into safe mode. Always the same thing. I did nothing to modify it prior. It kinda just started this. Please help me!

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One easy thing you could try is shutting down the computer and unplugging its power cord for about 30 seconds, then replug and reboot and see if that gets it back to normal. That may sound strange but it's worked for me before with issues that seem to pop up out of nowhere.

Not sure how far you want to go to optimize, but if that potentially includes any hardware purchases that will help increase overall performance then you could:

1) Buy a PCI SATA card (such as Sonnet's Tempo Serial ATA card) and install that for your hard drive(s) instead of running them on the slower ATA/100 connection. Of course of you do this then you'll have to purchase SATA hard drive(s), which brings us to #2:

2) Buy an SSD for your boot drive - much faster than standard SATA HDD

3) Max out your RAM if it's not already

The above 3 steps alone should give you a very noticeable performance increase, for a reasonable overall price. The following 2 steps may be more of an expense:

4) If you're doing anything graphics-intensive, you can also upgrade the GPU

5) Consider the possibility of a processor upgrade. But note that this is a higher ticket item and may or may not be worth the expense.

LOLZpersonok said:

It already has Tiger, it says in my Signature.

I kinda got around to trying your tips today only to find that it now gives me a Kernel Panic just before it hits the logon screen. I can't get it to boot without extensions or into safe mode. Always the same thing. I did nothing to modify it prior. It kinda just started this. Please help me!

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Now your only remedy would be reinstall, I presume. You most likely "slimmed" too much.
Do not try any "magic" and "secrets" unless you know what you're doing.

And posters that are encouraging others to do similar optimization should at least explain its potential risk. Including "what to do and what to do not". Not everyone here is a "power user", keep that in mind.

How fast does it boot?

quasinormal said:

How fast does it boot?

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LOLZpersonok said:

I kinda got around to trying your tips today only to find that it now gives me a Kernel Panic just before it hits the logon screen. I can't get it to boot without extensions or into safe mode.

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It doesn't boot. If the OP would please tell us what he did, it would help to diagnose the problem.

It looks like the OP said he hadn't done anything to modify the computer prior to the kernel panic. LOLZpersonok, was the kernel panic issue resolved?

666sheep said:

And posters that are encouraging others to do similar optimization should at least explain its potential risk. Including "what to do and what to do not". Not everyone here is a "power user", keep that in mind.

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Very true, xslimmer trashed my installations twice in the past so don't use it any more (never noticed any difference in performance even when it did work)

LOLZpersonok said:

Funny you should ask that the problem is resolved. It is, idk how this worked:

There's the PMU reset button inside on the logic board. I pressed that for a second and it worked...Weird. I tried it just now.

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Yay! Praise God, that is good!

LOLZpersonok said:

I only use the PMU reset when it won't turn on but the power light flashes.

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Interesting. In my one past experience with the flashing power light issue, replacing the PRAM battery was how it got fixed. Prior to changing the battery it wouldn't boot at all.

Also once you do any cleaning steps that you deem necessary to take, look into two must-have utilities if you don't have them already: Drive Genius and DiskWarrior. Although, it may be a good idea to go ahead and use them for some preliminary maintenance steps before any other cleaning steps are done.

Drive Genius does many good things (including defrag, which IMO helps overall system performance regardless of what Apple says) and DiskWarrior is great for rebuilding file directories. I have used them both for some time now and they are excellent programs.

Both software companies (ProSoft Engineering and Alsoft, respectively) are well-established and know their stuff.

Drive Genius is currently at version 3, but the last version that's compatible with PPC is version 2 (look for it on ebay). Version 1 is also good if you can't find version 2 for whatever reason. DiskWarrior is currently at version 4. I suggest you read up on DiskWarrior at http://www.alsoft.com for any OS-specific instructions/issues/limitations.

LOLZpersonok said:

Mine has not been as fast as I expected it to be when I first got it. You'll see it's specs in my signature. Anyways, when I got it, it came running Tiger. I have reason to believe it wasn't a clean install and the previous owner simply deleted their files.

Any tips for optimization?

(If there's any more information you need I can supply it)

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Hi,

I have the same machine, albeit a DP 1Ghz. I consider it fully useable for everyday tasks and I even do some work on it with legacy software (, but as I use it keyboard-mouse-and displayless, I actually work on it remotely).

Anyway, IMNSHO the most important thing with a PM G4 is using max ram, so you can feel confident that you've got that covered...

Other thing is that it's a 10 years old machine, so (when possible) try running 10 years old programs OR new programs tailored to PPC and low hardware requirements.
- OS: Tiger or Leopard (if you do not need the leopard-additions, stay with Tiger)
- Browsers: Camino, TenFourFox (everyone has his/her favorite, so I expect people may come with other suggestions here)
- Office: Office 2004 or older
- Online video: MacTubes
etc.
There are some really nice sites for finding legacy/PPC software, and I suggest you acquaint yourself with them...

Storage: If you can make do with the drives it currently contains, then so be it. If not, the Sonnet SATA card mentioned here is really good. Not cheap, but good. I use it and two 2TB drives and the data transfer rates are just as they're supposed to.

GPU, depends on what it has now and whether it is dragging you down.

Not a performance issue as such, but how's the noise level? If it's an annoyance, you could look around online for solutions (there's a lot of this online and if you want to drop me a line, I'll walk you through the do's and do not's.)

RGDS,