Is my partitioned hard disc causing the problems on my G4?

[slim tim slide]

Being something of an ignoramus I have relied on the help of a friend who partitioned the hard disc on my G4, partly so I could run Norton Utilities from one partition to clean up the other, also so I could run OS9.2.2 from one partition and OSx.3 on the other. In fact the OSX partition also has a copy of OS9.2 on it. Is this causing the problems I'm having? Crashes, very slow response to some commands on and off line, erratic behaviour where a programme works fine one day, not the next. Even my printer which used to work on the OS9.2.2 partition now only works on the OS.9.s section of the other partition even though I've tried re-installing! It's a nightmare - I have to design on one partiton, restart and print on the other!!! My G4 is (unfortunately) the very early one with a 350Hz processor and single CPU (I think that's the right term?), a total RAM of 128MB and each side of the partition has a memory of 4.78GB. I realize this is puny these days but I can't afford to upgrade right now - any advise would really be a help! Thanks in advance folks...

 

[LouisBlack]

How much free space do you have on your OSX partition? It is reccomended that you keep around 10% free to allow for virtual memory (the OS will offload anything it can't fit on the RAM into virtual memory. Hard drives are much slower than RAM so you should try to limit the amount that this happens. If you don't have any room for VM, your machine will be doubly slow.

My advice is to delete any partition you don't need or buy a bigger hard drive (very cheap these days although your machine can't accept anything bigger than 120GB without an extra PCI card). You could also do with more RAM. Try to pick up at least 512mb. That should make 10.3 very usable.