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iBook G4, 933MHz, 640 MB of RAM. Leopard or Tiger

128keaton

128keaton

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Jan 13, 2013
2,029
419
While I love Tiger, I've always preferred Leopard, just due to fond memories of my childhood, customization options, the "improved" Finder, and the darker colors. Out of all of this, I don't want to trade performance. Does anyone have any suggestions? I shouldn't have to use LA or TDM to install, since it is natively supported. I still want to have it usable. Should I install Leopard or not?
 
The 640MB of ram could hinder performance a tiny bit, but it'd be usable. May not overly good at multitasking.
 
gavinstubbs09 said:
I'm for Leopard, just disable all the eye-candy and things like Dashboard/Spotlight and you should be good to go!
Click to expand...

It totally agree with you. Download eyoungren's Secrets prefpane, and disable tons of stuff like what you mentioned, and it'll fly! Just maybe not as well as Tiger, but Leopard's where it's at if you can do it! I'm not saying Tiger's a bad OS, but if you can run Leopard, do it!
128keaton said:
While I love Tiger, I've always preferred Leopard, just due to fond memories of my childhood, customization options, the "improved" Finder, and the darker colors. Out of all of this, I don't want to trade performance. Does anyone have any suggestions? I shouldn't have to use LA or TDM to install, since it is natively supported. I still want to have it usable. Should I install Leopard or not?
Click to expand...
 
gavinstubbs09 said:
I just did both of these about an hour ago on my iMac G4 and I noticed it performed much better. Next is to disable Time Machine as I never need it for this computer.

http://powerpcaccess.blogspot.com/2013/03/how-to-disable-dashboard-spotlight.html#.UyYIvqWuTjQ
Click to expand...

Ive always done this to disable spotlight...any thoughts?

cd /etc
sudo nano hostconfig
SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
ctrl-x
y
enter

Then to get rid of the existing index, run these two commands
sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo mdutil -E /

reboot computer

remove spotlight icon

1. As an administrator, navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices, and delete Search.bundle. If you think might want to re-enable it later, just move it somewhere else or rename it.
2. Open up the Activity Monitor and force quit SystemUIServer. When it reopens, your menu bar will be Spotlight free.
 
tom vilsack said:
Ive always done this to disable spotlight...any thoughts?

cd /etc
sudo nano hostconfig
SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
ctrl-x
y
enter

Then to get rid of the existing index, run these two commands
sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo mdutil -E /

reboot computer

remove spotlight icon

1. As an administrator, navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices, and delete Search.bundle. If you think might want to re-enable it later, just move it somewhere else or rename it.
2. Open up the Activity Monitor and force quit SystemUIServer. When it reopens, your menu bar will be Spotlight free.
Click to expand...
Just one thought. I discovered at a certain point that it's not necessary to use Terminal to call nano or pico or whatever. You can do this in Text Edit.

To get to the file, I usually just open a new window then press CMD+SHIFT+G and enter /etc. That takes you right to the etc folder. Find the file. Grab it and drop it on TextEdit or do a contextual menu Open With…

Edit, Save. Done. No having to use Terminal for this. If I get any permissions sqawking by the OS then I just save to the desktop, close and then drop the file back in to the /etc folder and authenticate. Again, done.
 
Last edited:
tom vilsack said:
Ive always done this to disable spotlight...any thoughts?

cd /etc
sudo nano hostconfig
SPOTLIGHT=-NO-
ctrl-x
y
enter

Then to get rid of the existing index, run these two commands
sudo mdutil -i off /
sudo mdutil -E /

reboot computer

remove spotlight icon

1. As an administrator, navigate to /System/Library/CoreServices, and delete Search.bundle. If you think might want to re-enable it later, just move it somewhere else or rename it.
2. Open up the Activity Monitor and force quit SystemUIServer. When it reopens, your menu bar will be Spotlight free.
Click to expand...

This disables it on Tiger. It's a bit different for Leopard.
 
Pulled the Leopard trigger, seems to work fine. I remember using Leopard on a DVI PowerBook (512 MB of RAM, 667MHz, totally unsupported :p). It definitely needs some RAM though, so with more money coming in this week, I should get some RAM.
 
128keaton said:
TenFourFox is laggy, and I don't like the UI. So yeah. Not hating, just personal.
Click to expand...

I actually do like the UI, you can add FireFox themes to it and everything, but its gotten pretty slow on my G4, so I've started using Webkit. At first TFF was fast, but Webkit now seems much faster. :)
 
128keaton said:
TenFourFox is laggy, and I don't like the UI. So yeah. Not hating, just personal.
Click to expand...
Ahhh, but this is where the advantage is to T4Fx. Just like regular Firefox you can go to about:config and edit your settings. Anything that applies to speeding up Firefox applies here. And there are oodles of about:config options out there to tweak Firefox.

Initialpaintdelay, pipelining, maxserverrequests, etc, etc.

You can't really do that with Safari or Webkit. It is what it is.

However, that all said, I get personal preference. We all like our own thing.

----------
jrsx said:
I actually do like the UI, you can add FireFox themes to it and everything, but its gotten pretty slow on my G4, so I've started using Webkit. At first TFF was fast, but Webkit now seems much faster. :)
Click to expand...
Try tweaking settings in about:config
 
jrsx said:
...And you like the wrong thing! Just kidding. :)
I'll have to try to speed up TFF in about:config.
Click to expand...
LOL! If you have questions, ask. I've got my config tweaked to within a micron of it's life.
 
eyoungren said:
LOL! If you have questions, ask. I've got my config tweaked to within a micron of it's life.
Click to expand...

Well, back to TFF. Would you provide assistance for about:config. At this point, I didn't know you could apply themes and make it faster, so I'd definitely like to give it another go.
 
128keaton said:
Well, back to TFF. Would you provide assistance for about:config. At this point, I didn't know you could apply themes and make it faster, so I'd definitely like to give it another go.
Click to expand...

The thing is, there's really not hundreds of themes like in Chrome, and not all of them are compatible with TFF. But there are several themes that are, and look cool as well. :cool:
 
128keaton said:
Well, back to TFF. Would you provide assistance for about:config. At this point, I didn't know you could apply themes and make it faster, so I'd definitely like to give it another go.
Click to expand...
Take a look here. :)

As to "themes," there are lots. And some while saying not compatible can forcibly installed. For instance, my theme is FTDeepDark. The dev only makes it for Windows or UNIX/Linux. But I force-installed the UNIX/Linux one and it works just fine.

----------
jrsx said:
The thing is, there's really not hundreds of themes like in Chrome, and not all of them are compatible with TFF. But there are several themes that are, and look cool as well. :cool:
Click to expand...
Firefox had themes well before Chrome ever got on the scene. Any FF theme is compatible with T4Fx. See above about my comment on themes.

You can find all this stuff at addons.mozilla.org. Major resource there.

----------

I'll get a breakdown of what my config file reads when I get home later in order to show some more of the optimizations.

A few addons work wonders too. AdBlockEdge, NoScript, RequestPolicy, etc. All of those can control the crap coming at your browser that bogs things down.

I'll get back to you guys. For now, that link I posted is a pretty good start.
 
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