Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
MAC OS X running too slow!
- Thread starter mactib
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Panther might run slightly faster. Check Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder to see if there's a process or something using up lots of your resources. If you have Panther and no need for Tiger's extra features, then I'd recommend downgrading. I think you'd see some benefits. 
Hmm, has it been running for quite some time or have you just installed it? Also, check to see that spotlight is not currently indexing your drive and that you don't have 476239857913864918347 widgets running at the same time. Tiger should be okay.
I think the problem is that the computer you're using is about 5 years old (older?). In other words, you're SOL on this one.
I agree with GimmeSlack... if you install Jaguar (which is contemporary with that Mac), alongside Jaguar era software, it should run fairly quickly (because it has rather a lot of RAM and a newer HD). This is loosely true for Tiger, too, although Tiger has more services running in the background for Spotlight and Dashboard and so on that seem to make this somewhat more questionable.
In general, OS X has gotten faster on a given computer, given adequate RAM and HD space, over time -- e.g. Panther should actually be faster than Jaguar on your computer. But that is decidedly not true for most applications.
That computer is on the slower end of the computers released with Panther, and certainly slower by a factor of almost three than the slowest computer available when Tiger was released. And those computers were the benchmark app developers were using to determine if their apps were reasonably resource-wise.
So you can make it work reasonably well with applications written in the Tiger or Panther era, but it is not going to be as fast as a machine that was contemporary with those OS versions without a processor upgrade. There are processor upgrades available, though, if that's what you want.
Here would be my suggestions, though, if you want to continue on with this:
1) If you are using Tiger, disable Dashboard, consider disabling Spotlight, shut down any servers etc that you don't want/need, disable FUS, etc. Avoid multitasking programs that are not so good about the amount of system resources that they use while not in focus (MS Office is a known culprit). Mitthrawnuruodo has a thread somewhere about related tips for speeding up Tiger up, although the computer he was using was a little different (much faster processor but less RAM and HD space, IIRC).
2) If you are using Panther, or even for Tiger, try to find relatively older versions of apps that still work on the given OS and meet your needs. They will probably run faster than the latest app revisions.
In general, OS X has gotten faster on a given computer, given adequate RAM and HD space, over time -- e.g. Panther should actually be faster than Jaguar on your computer. But that is decidedly not true for most applications.
That computer is on the slower end of the computers released with Panther, and certainly slower by a factor of almost three than the slowest computer available when Tiger was released. And those computers were the benchmark app developers were using to determine if their apps were reasonably resource-wise.
So you can make it work reasonably well with applications written in the Tiger or Panther era, but it is not going to be as fast as a machine that was contemporary with those OS versions without a processor upgrade. There are processor upgrades available, though, if that's what you want.
Here would be my suggestions, though, if you want to continue on with this:
1) If you are using Tiger, disable Dashboard, consider disabling Spotlight, shut down any servers etc that you don't want/need, disable FUS, etc. Avoid multitasking programs that are not so good about the amount of system resources that they use while not in focus (MS Office is a known culprit). Mitthrawnuruodo has a thread somewhere about related tips for speeding up Tiger up, although the computer he was using was a little different (much faster processor but less RAM and HD space, IIRC).
2) If you are using Panther, or even for Tiger, try to find relatively older versions of apps that still work on the given OS and meet your needs. They will probably run faster than the latest app revisions.
I have a similar nice old sawtooth 400 mhz with 1 gig, and I'm sorry to say it, but I think your problem is that it is simply a bit old for Tiger. I run mine primarily as a fileserver, but when I occasionally use it face to face, I never run dashboard and only have very few processes running, otherwise it's just too slow. If you really use it as your main machine, downgrading to panther would probably speed things up, as panther is not as demanding as tiger.
One more thing I've personally noted and commented on with Tiger is that Mail 2.x seems very sensitive to the size of the mail archives. With ~2 gigs of e-mail on my iBook (G4 / 800MHz / 12" / 640MB / 40GB HD / BT and AE) and Mail running in the background, performance was nowhere near acceptable.
What I did: I moved my primary Mail.app library to my iMac G5 and stopped using Mail.app on my iBook (I keep my two major e-mail accounts open in Firefox through web interface instead). I also disabled Dashboard, and conserved some disk space so I had a robust amount of free space (which shouldn't be an issue for you). Now, running Firefox, iCal, iTunes, Adium, and Word, I actually get pretty good performance. At least not that much worse than it was under Panther.
What I did: I moved my primary Mail.app library to my iMac G5 and stopped using Mail.app on my iBook (I keep my two major e-mail accounts open in Firefox through web interface instead). I also disabled Dashboard, and conserved some disk space so I had a robust amount of free space (which shouldn't be an issue for you). Now, running Firefox, iCal, iTunes, Adium, and Word, I actually get pretty good performance. At least not that much worse than it was under Panther.
I think you are failing to acknowledge the obvious and shouldn't waste your time installing Panther. Don't expect anything with Panther, just less features. You want the honest truth? Buy a new Mac.mactib said:
If that isn't an option then I would suggest you get used to what you got.
mactib said:
I would say ignore the general populace with regards to "trashing" this macintosh.
One of the things you will have to deal with is the fact that the system is going to be sluggish when compared to many modern Macintosh computers, but it is FAR from worthless.
While I do have a G5 Powermac, and a ibook 1.3 GHZ, I still find my G4 500 to be quite capable of a system! Some basic things you can do to keep your system moving at it's quickest would be exactly what mkrishnan recommended you do.
Dashbord widgets take up LOTS of VM (for what they are), and will eat CPU cycles and continue paging when you are not using them. You can disable dashboard itself, however by itself it doesn't take much memory with no widgets loaded.
An other thing that you can do, is remove any extra Languages you have installed (default with OSX). While the apparent benefit is less disk space used by the OS, it also reduces some load on the system.
If your system hasn't had it done in a long time, you may also want to try to Repair Disk Permissions. For whatever reason whenever my G4 starts to slow down (it's uptime averages 3 months between reboots), doing a permissions repair brings some new life back into the system.
On my G4 (even with my PM G5 sitting directly next to it)
- I watch videos on VLC (old keynote videos, TV shows from iTunes)
- Browse the web (including Macrumors)
- Encode video for my iPod using iSquint (takes a while, but it is a good overnight task to use CPU cycles)
- Manage my iTunes library
Best of luck, and enjoy your G4!