12 inch Powerbook 1ghz

[charl051]

Hello there,

I bought a 12inch Powerbook G4 a few months ago to use for web design. It was my first Mac having worked for years on a PC. On the whole it works well. I love its portability, quiet fan and the Panther OS.

However, I find it slow at a lot of things, particularly the latest versions of Dreamweaver and Fireworks and I generally need to run Virtual PC 6 to test my work in Windows browsers. This is achingly slow.

I've been thinking about upgrading to the 15in or 17inch models, what would anyone recommend? Will there be a really signficant performance difference? How would they rate against a Pentium 4 PC?

 

[BowiPod]

have you got plenty of RAM? That would be a start.

I used the 867 (but am awaiting delivery of a new 1GHZ model) for web design and found that RAM helped a great deal.

If not 15" and 17" models are indeed more suitable to demanding design work due to their system architecture.

 

[charl051]

have you got plenty of RAM? That would be a start.

I have the maximum amount of RAM, which is something like 640.

 

[Grimace]

it really shouldn't be all that slow. Zapping your PRAM fixes lots of weird stuff...

 

[pdrayton]

First, you've only got half the RAM that's possible on a 12" PB 1GHz. You can max it to 1.256GB of RAM.

Before maxing your RAM, though, have you ever "Repaired Permissions"? I bet you've never done that... go to Applications -> Utilities and when the box pops-up click on "Repair Permissions".

See if repairing permissions speeds things up... and repair those permissions after doing a "Software Update" from Apple or installing new software.

My PowerBook is VERY speedy, and I keep abreast of repairing permissions. Far cheaper than buying a new PowerBook!

 

[rinseout]

Originally posted by pdrayton
Before maxing your RAM, though, have you ever "Repaired Permissions"?

I was wondering if somebody could explain what "Repair Permissions" is supposed to do. It seems to me that it isn't exactly secure to let the OS decide what the permissions should be on your files.

How do the permissions get broken?

(edit: format)

 

[pdrayton]

I was wondering if somebody could explain what "Repair Permissions" is supposed to do. It seems to me that it isn't exactly secure to let the OS decide what the permissions should be on your files.

Well, if you do just a wee bit of legwork and do a search on "repair permissions" on this forum you'll find: Mac Forums Thread

 

[rinseout]

Originally posted by pdrayton
Well, if you do just a wee bit of legwork and do a search on "repair permissions" on this forum you'll find: Mac Forums Thread

I knew it wouldn't be long before somebody had to be snarky. From the mentioned thread:

I dont know why but mostly the installers screw it up I guess.

So, even that thread doesn't give a certain answer as to how the permissions get changed.

Why on earth are installers changing permissions on files that are not their own?
And how does the OS know what the correct and secure permissions are for a given file?

It's just that it seems to me that this could break things. Suppose you had something that had to be suid root or something; how would/does the OS know whether this was its correct and intended setting? Does it ask before changing permissions?

I'm just after a bit of information on this feature, since coming from a UNIX background, I've never heard of permissions getting broken and it seems like it could cause some really serious trouble (both the breaking and the fixing).

 

[jamdr]

Re: 12 inch Powerbook 1ghz

Originally posted by charl051
I find it slow at a lot of things, particularly the latest versions of Dreamweaver and Fireworks and I generally need to run Virtual PC 6 to test my work in Windows browsers. This is achingly slow.

Yes, this is normal. The 12" PowerBook G4 is slow, and the 15" and 17" versions aren't much better. I think it's false advertising for Apple to say this is a "pro" machine when I can't even do basic "pro" tasks such as the ones you describe. It also can't run Photoshop (or any other app in Adobe's suite) at reasonable speeds, let alone the custom software I needed it for. Don't waste your money upgrading your RAM from 640MB to 1.25GB--it won't make that much of a difference. The truth is that the G4 processor, coupled with the slow bus and lack of L3 cache, is outdated. Just wait for G5 PowerBook, or go the route I'm taking and buy a G5 desktop and then an iBook for basic computing tasks on the go.

Sorry if I seem rude or unreasonable, but if you were the one who spent more than 2K on a PowerBook with all the upgrades, and still got unacceptable performance, I think you'd understand.

 

[charl051]

First of all let me apologise for getting my facts wrong. I have the 867 model, not the 1ghz. I'd forgotten that important fact. I have repaired the permissions and zapped the whatyamacallit and the system does seem to be a bit snappier generally. Thanks for that advice.I also looked up issues with Dreamweaver and it seems that the latest Mac version is extremely slow no matter what the machine.

Does anyone know if Virtual PC with Win2K runs at a decent speed on one of the quicker Powerbooks? Because its virtually unusable on the 12inch model.

 

[pdrayton]

Originally posted by rinseout
I was wondering if somebody could explain what "Repair Permissions" is supposed to do. It seems to me that it isn't exactly secure to let the OS decide what the permissions should be on your files.

How do the permissions get broken?

Looking at your original question, and following the link to the other thread about repairing permissions, one can easily see that your question was answered.

You're being just a bit disingenuous by quoting an offhanded comment from a very long explanation in order to mislead people into thinking that the answer to your question wasn't in the link. First, you claimed that the linked-to thread didn't answer your question because it said:

quote:
I dont know why but mostly the installers screw it up I guess

The actual thread said:

OS X is based on Unix, which is a multiuser system. To manage this Unix uses file ownership and permissions.
Every file on the system has some permissions to define who can do what with the file. There are three groups -
1.user owner
2.group owner
3.others
and the permissions are
1.read
2.write
3.execute
User is someone having an account on OSx
Group is just a group of users. Every user has to have atleast 1 group.
So a file permission would tell what a user, group and others can do with the file.
Anyways sometimes when you are installing some stuff, or running some applications, some important file permissions get changed. I dont know why but mostly the installers screw it up I guess.
Once they get changed, things go crappy, program would quit on you, your prefernce wont be rememberd and other things. So repairing permissions takes care of that.

I think it's obvious that I was actually doing research for you AND creating a link to it while encouraging you to try to do some very simple work to find answers on your own.

As for being snarky, I think you model the behavior very well.

Glad repairing permissions has speeded up the PowerBook. As for Virtual PC, it's notoriously slow.

 

[rinseout]

The answer to my question isn't in the link you reference. I didn't ask "what are permissions?" nor did I ask "what kind of problems can result from broken permissions?" The thread you reference did a good job with those.

My question remains why applications and installers can modify the permissions of files they don't own, and how on Earth does OS X know what the "correct" value of permissions are supposed to be. It seems to me that if "repairing" permissions is necessary from time to time that the OS could be broken in some respect. You can set permissions on files to anything you like, and mean them to be that way; who is the OS to tell you what they should be, much less "repair" them? I can think of some ways of doing this repair that don't frighten me as much as other ways of doing it, so I'm trying to determine what the precise mechanism is that it uses to repair permissions.

I haven't been able to answer this question on my own, and I find it unsettling that OS X has a function that goes through and changes permissions on files to what it thinks they ought to be. I'm trying to understand why, how, or if that works. (My suspicion is that it doesn't always do what you hope it would).

You can rest assured, though, that I don't need your encouragement to find these answers on my own. I posted because its a question that's been on my mind for some time now and I hadn't yet found a satisfactory answer to it.

 

[pdrayton]

Originally posted by rinseout
I was wondering if somebody could explain what "Repair Permissions" is supposed to do. It seems to me that it isn't exactly secure to let the OS decide what the permissions should be on your files.

How do the permissions get broken?

You had two questions. The first was "I was wondering if somebody could explain what 'Repair Permissions' is supposed to do." The anwer found in the link is, "Anyways sometimes when you are installing some stuff, or running some applications, some important file permissions get changed. I dont know why but mostly the installers screw it up I guess. Once they get changed, things go crappy, program would quit on you, your prefernce wont be rememberd and other things. So repairing permissions takes care of that".

The second question was, "How do permissions get broken?". Again, the answer found in the link is "...sometimes when you are installing some stuff, or running some applications, some important file permissions get changed".

Now that that's out of the way, I see from your additional responses that you would like more detailed information. Alas, I couldn't discern from your original post that you wanted answers to questions you hadn't yet asked.

I think your questions would make an excellent new thread, perhaps with a title like "Repair Permissions - A Security Issue?" and include all the concerns you've stated so far. Should be interesting to see if any additional information comes about.

My hunch is that you'll find that repairing permissions is merely returning corrupted files to their default (and proper) state, and that the default state is determined by Apple who writes the programs and designs them to work as efficiently as possible. Thus, no need to be frightened or unsettled.