This may be a silly question, but I am wondering what is acceptable in terms of performance for the iMac G5. I bought the stock machine 20" screen, 512 RAM, 250 Gb HD. I know that a little extra RAM will go a long way, but I have noticed some speed degredation on simple tasks such as opening safari or even opening the hard drive to add an application to the correct folder. This has happened with iPhoto open, but also with nothing open. Should I be concerned?
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iMac Performance Issue
- Thread starter gator95
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Check out the Activity Monitor, it is under the Applications\Utilites folder. Sometimes a misbehaving widget can eat up lots of resources, so check how much idle processor it is showing, and look at your free amount of ram. More than likely, something is hogging everything up, widgets like to do this when something goes wrong.
How many widgets do you have? When you have that little RAM, you might have a problem with having too many widgets which take up a lot of the available RAM. Also look at Activity Monitor and see how much RAM is available. Perhaps you should just get another RAM chip.
I have only installed one new widget. The one for the gas prices although it is sketchy at best. Other than that, the system is as delivered. The CPU is 90% idle most of the time although I did see it dip to 67% for a split second. The memory does seem to be an issue. There is 404.22 MB used and 107.78 MB free. If this is normal then I am off to the crucial web site to buy the 1 GB.
Before you head to crucial---Get this problem fixed--You have no programs running and it says 404 mb's used????
FF_productions said:
Woah, I wouldn't just to this conclusion yet. The system itself takes up a lot of ram and dashboard and finder can as well. He didn't state he had no programs open. Before I got my 1gig stick, it said I only had about 10mb free at times. Now I usually have 500-600 megs free.
Go for an additional 1GB of RAM- then you will be crusin'. Still, your iMac G5 should be fine w/ 512MB (performance wise).
frankly, I was shocked at the speed increase when I added my extra ram. The computer started up in about 3 seconds and every app starts up in one bounce. Everything loads noticeably faster, by far the best upgrade I have done to a computer yet.
Thank you for all of the replies. I did a reboot to make sure that nothing was open and I went down to 196 used. With Safari open right now I am at 231. That is not bad, but it did freeze up on the reboot so I had to hold down the power switch to turn it off. This is what I was trying to get rid of by replacing the Windows machine. I'll keep tabs on it and see if this was just a one time occurance. In any case, is it any more difficult to add RAM to the iMac than it was in my old Windows box?
Don't the iMac G5s have a setting to reduce processor performance to reduce heat and electrical draw? Have you tried setting the performance to higher/highest? I believe it's in the Energy Saver prefpane..
gator95 said:
I don't think it can be any easier to add RAm to your iMac. There are 3 screws on the bottom you turn, then the back just slips out and the whole inside is exposed. You'll see the ram slots on the right.
Definitely check the processor setting as yellow says.
In a speedtest at barefeats (I think) the iMac on automatic setting was very slow and in some tasks was beaten by the iBook and Mac mini.
After being switched to highest it almost flew out of the window.
Well, you get the idea
In a speedtest at barefeats (I think) the iMac on automatic setting was very slow and in some tasks was beaten by the iBook and Mac mini.
After being switched to highest it almost flew out of the window.
Well, you get the idea
you can always try www.macosxcocktail.com if it's a cron job issue or just general repairing of permissions ect this is an easy tool to use, and is now tiger friendly
chris
chris
DONT get ram from Crucial!!!!!! I just got an iMac G5, ordered 512mb from Crucial and installed it upon the computer's arrival. I got a kernel panic on the first boot up! It froze intermittantly until I pulled the extra ram out, and it's been flawless ever since. I sent it in and they exchanged it, re-installed it, and guess what? Instant Kernel Panic. Stay away!
I tried changing that energy setting to high. When I walked away for a few minutes and the computer went to sleep I was unable to get it going again. I had to do a hard reboot which then made the fan go on full blast. It sounded like an airplane flying over. This is now my second hard reboot. From everything I have read about the stability of OS X, this does not seem normal. I am going to contact Apple to see if there is a diagnostic to run that might identify a problem.
wwooden said:
wwooden, where did you buy your 1 gig RAM from? I was thinking of adding just another 512mb to make a total of 1 gig. Will i still get that "one bounce" for most apps and OS X starting in 3 seconds with a total of 1 gig of RAM. Or sould i go 1.5gb?