iMac G4v is bogging down, anything I can do?

[Laroosco]

It's my mothers computer and she just uses it for checking email, and basic browsing.

It's really bogging down a lot lately. She'll be checking email and the colorwheel will start spinning and stay there forever, 10-15 minutes at times.

Is there any kind of maintenance program or something that will help?? THis should still be a decent machine for what she needs it for

Thanks

 

[spice weasel]

Does she keep a lot of her emails? A friend of mine has 20K+ email messages (aside from spam, she never deletes them) and her Mail.app runs really slowly sometimes.

Macs don't really suffer too badly from disk fragmentation, but it does happen a bit over time, so doing some defragging might help. Also, OS X runs a bunch of chron scripts automatically during the middle of the night. If your mother puts her computer to sleep or shuts it down every day this could be preventing those scripts from running.

Repair permissions. Just one of those things you should run on occasion, since it often gets overlooked.

If you feel up to it, you can wipe the drive and do a fresh install of the OS. I sometimes do this on my older machines. It might help.

 

[CubeHacker]

Sounds like something is wrong to me. It shouldn't be doing that for 15 minutes at a time! Perhaps the hard drive is dying. It can cause problems like that.

 

[OrangeSVTguy]

I've been using my G4 iMac 1ghz for a week now and it seems to be fine for most stuff, although notably slower than my Powerbook. I also have 1.5gb of memory in it which helps it out a lot. I'm also using Leopard. I can tell when my CPU is bottlenecking as I have iStats Menu installed.

Which iMac G4 do you have? Having little memory will create a page file and start swapping with your slow HDD causing the "beachballs". Which version OS do you have installed?

Disabling Dashboard and Spotlight helps me out quite a bit too. Google those to learn how.

 

[Laroosco]

It's running 10.3.9

It's a 1.25Ghz Power Pc with 256 RAM.

 

[Hrududu]

It's running 10.3.9

It's a 1.25Ghz Power Pc with 256 RAM.

That 256Mb of RAM can be a contributing factor. Panther requires a MINIMUM of 256Mb of RAM. At the same time, it does sound like there's more here than just lack of RAM. How long has it been since the system has been wiped clean and a fresh OS install has been done? I would bet a fresh OS install and an additional 512Mb of RAM would fix this.