Here is a compilation of "performance tips" I put together for all my PPCs. I didn't write any of these—so all credit goes to the dudes who did
Give your PowerPC Mac a new lease on life
Disable Dashboard
The Dashboard can be useful and you may not want to disable it, but most people don’t use Dashboard often enough to justify the significant cost in RAM and processing power which it exacts. To disable the Dashboard, enter the following into Terminal.
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES; killall Dock
Spotlight
The Spotlight is a core feature of OS X but you may wish to look at Spotlight’s System Preferences pane and drag the search results in order of what you would like it to search for. This will speed up your Spotlight results and make your computer seem snappier. Since the above screenshot is taken from my work computer, I’ve disabled a few search results to speed it up even more, but only do this if you’re sure you won’t need to search for them.
Disable DNS Pre-fetching
1. Open Terminal (in /Applications/Utilities).
2. Execute the Terminal command below to disable DNS prefetching:
defaults write com.apple.safari WebKitDNSPrefetchingEnabled -boolean false
3. Quit Safari, then open it again and test for the issue.
ALSO: In the Network System Preference, Click the "Advanced" button and set "Configure IPv6" to OFF.
aslmanager taking up 99% of CPU
Fix: Restart log managers after removing asl data.
Open the Terminal application and enter the following two commands to stop the log managers:
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.syslogd
sudo launchctl stop com.apple.aslmanager
Then create a folder on your desktop called "temp" (to store the moved "data store" files), and enter the following command in the Terminal to move the "ASL" data to the new temporary folder:
sudo mv /var/log/asl/* ~/Desktop/temp/
Finally, restart the "syslogd" process with the following command (the aslmanager will be started when needed by syslogd, so it doesnt need to be manually restarted):
sudo launchctl start com.apple.syslogd
Run iMovie '09 on a PowerPC G4
To patch iMovie '09 so that it will run on a PowerPC G4, Control-click on iMovie and pick Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. In the new window that appears, navigate into Contents » MacOS. Now you'll need a hex editor such as the free HexEdit; once you have that, edit the file iMovie in the MacOS folder.
Use the File » Go To Address function in HexEdit to go to the following addresses, and replace each existing entry at those addresses (7C 08 02 A6) with 4E 80 00 20. The addresses are 15fb9c, 15fc7c, and 15fe00.
What you're doing here is replacing the PowerPC instruction for mflr r0, which basically initializes the stack for the called function, with blr, which essentially causes the called function to always return, voiding the purpose of the function. So when the function is the PowerPC check, you've essentially patched your way around it.
When done, save the file and quit HexEdit, and iMovie '09 should launch on your G4.
Making Leopard As Snappy As Tiger Without Removing Anything
Many people I know who still use PowerPC Macs are using what many consider to be the greatest version of OS X ever released, Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger". It is a great OS that runs amazingly well on any machine including G3's that didn't support it officially but with its age it feels a bit lacking. It's snappy sure, it runs with limited resources yes, but doesn't it just feel old now? With PowerPC support having been long abandoned by many developers and Tiger having been discontinued 6 years ago it's no surprise to find that much of the software for it is way out of date. So you turn to the last PPC OS which was Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" which many people find "sluggish" and "unresponsive" on their PowerPC machines. Well here's a quick guide to making Leopard as snappy as Tiger without removing or disabling anything like most people suggest:
The biggest thing: Disable BeamSync. If you're coming from Linux or Windows or anywhere in the 3D gaming world then you'll know beamsync as VSync. Instead of getting into the details of what it does (nothing important, Google it if you're so inclined) I'm just going to tell you that it at the least doubles all of Leopards CPU needs and GPU needs. If you have Xcode installed you can use the Quartz Debug Tool to disable it temporarily and see what I mean. To disable it permanently open Terminal and type (or copy and paste) the following. Log out and back in to see the effect, watch videos and try games that were slow before:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Compositor -dict deferredUpdates 0
To enable BeamSync again use the same command except change the 0 at the end to 1.
Another thing you can enable is something called QuartzGL. You see QuartzGL was an experimental feature that Apple was working on during Tigers development and eventually abandoned during Leopards release. The idea of it was to offload even more of the GUI's drawing aspects onto the graphics processor thus saving the CPU from having to do so much. The only problem I've found with enabling this feature system wide is artifacts here and there but nothing serious. Otherwise it's harmless and with testing using XBench I've found it to noticably improve many aspects. To enable QuartzGL type or copy and paste the following into Terminal:
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver QuartzGLEnabled -boolean YES
To disable it again then type the same command into Terminal except change the YES at the end to NO.
Both of the above should greatly improve Leopard's overall responsiveness. Also if you perform both of these on a machine running Tiger you'll see a noticable improvement as well, especially on an older machine.
Two-Finger Scrolling for Pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks
iScroll2 is a modified trackpad driver that adds two-finger scrolling capabilities to supported pre-2005 PowerBooks and iBooks on OS X 10.3 and up. Supported models include most aluminum PowerBooks introduced from 2003 to 2004 as well as most G4 iBooks.
http://iscroll2.sourceforge.net
