Is there something wrong with my ti 667 Mhz or do I need a faster system?

[Over Achiever]

I wanted to start a thread for a friend of mine

Originally posted by beatle888
Hi, i know this is off topic but MacRumors
wont let me create a new topic.

Well, heres the subject. I am unimpressed
with my 667mhz laptop and I've put it on
ebay for auction. Applications take to long
to start up, GUI elements are to stickie and
Photoshop with 420Mbs Isn't enough to
push around a 100Mb file. My question to
you is...does it sound like theres something
wrong with my system or does it sound like
i need a faster system and that this is normal
performance for a 667?

thank you.

Any words of advice for him?

 

[Moxiemike]

Re: Is there something wrong with my ti 667 Mhz or do I need a faster system?

Originally posted by Over Achiever
I wanted to start a thread for a friend of mine



Any words of advice for him?

It completely sounds like something he's doing. I have a 667, with 512mb of ram, 30 gb hd and PS performance was fine in 10.1 and even better in 10.2.

I'd push around digital images, 3 or 4 at a time (14.1mb each) and have no lags or anything.

It's rock solid for ID layout and AI illustrations.

Booya ti!

Did he try reformatting his drive and reinstalling X? Doing the permission fix in the disk utility? It sounds like something with the HD.... what vers PS is he running? OSX or Classic? Or 9?


m

 

[beatle888]

Re: Re: Is there something wrong with my ti 667 Mhz or do I need a faster system?

Originally posted by Moxiemike


It completely sounds like something he's doing. I have a 667, with 512mb of ram, 30 gb hd and PS performance was fine in 10.1 and even better in 10.2.

I'd push around digital images, 3 or 4 at a time (14.1mb each) and have no lags or anything.

It's rock solid for ID layout and AI illustrations.

Booya ti!

Did he try reformatting his drive and reinstalling X? Doing the permission fix in the disk utility? It sounds like something with the HD.... what vers PS is he running? OSX or Classic? Or 9?


m

Hi Mox, im the friend well, I am running
10.2.1 with PS 7.0.1. When i was working
inhouse on a 450mhz G4 with 700+ mb's of
ram I could actually work on a 1gig image
but with my laptop at 667 mhz i couldnt see
this as being possible. I think maybe it's
because of the slow laptop harddrive. maybe
i need to get a fast external for a scratch disk.

do you notice any GUI interface stickieness
outside of PS? For instance the doc is sticky
or sometimes when i open or navigate windows it gets sticky.

 

[krossfyter]

i have a ti 667 and i have no problems with it. i can effectively mess around with a 1 gig image while itunes and illustrator is up while of course photoshop is up to mess with the image. i have no idea why yours is jacking with you.

 

[Moxiemike]

Re: Re: Re: Is there something wrong with my ti 667 Mhz or do I need a faster system?

Originally posted by beatle888


Hi Mox, im the friend well, I am running
10.2.1 with PS 7.0.1. When i was working
inhouse on a 450mhz G4 with 700+ mb's of
ram I could actually work on a 1gig image
but with my laptop at 667 mhz i couldnt see
this as being possible. I think maybe it's
because of the slow laptop harddrive. maybe
i need to get a fast external for a scratch disk.

do you notice any GUI interface stickieness
outside of PS? For instance the doc is sticky
or sometimes when i open or navigate windows it gets sticky.

Hm. Haven't noticed anything like that. When you installed 10.2 did you do a clean install as opposed to an upgrade? initially, I did the upgrade and it really crippled the machine. (this was on a dual ghz QS)

When I backed everything up and did a clean install, including wiping the hard drive, I saw nothing but speed.

It could be the HD (although I haven't seen too much of a problem with that)

if you have access to a firewire drive, try that out. Maybe your HD is stuffed?? And you don't have enough scratch disk?? Did you try running disk first aid and repairing the permissions?

Other than that, a nice upgrade that will boost performance is getting a 5400rpm Toshiba or IBM replacement drive and having it installed.

 

[eyelikeart]

I have a Rev. B 667...same setup as Moxie...

I just updated this thing to 10.2 last Friday...and this thing rocks!!

Have u tried optimizing the hard drive by chance?

 

[buffsldr]

this could be a ram problem


please do the following.

1) check how much ram is in it
2) open up the standard apps you use then open terminal and type "top" at the command prompt . look and see if you have any pageouts...(it says "pageouts x", where x is replaced by the number)

 

[beatle888]

well i reformated

and things seem snappier! but i didnt install any software yet.
I wanted to see how the system ran while in a "virgin" state.
here are my results from the terminal test i was suppose to run.

Processes: 38 total, 2 running, 36 sleeping... 91 threads 22:33:53
Load Avg: 0.48, 0.11, 0.06 CPU usage: 9.5% user, 9.5% sys, 81.0% idle
SharedLibs: num = 7, resident = 2.20M code, 196K data, 564K LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 2150, resident = 29.9M + 5.20M private, 56.3M shared
PhysMem: 43.7M wired, 93.7M active, 129M inactive, 267M used, 245M free
VM: 1.22G + 3.62M 8317(0) pageins, 88(0) pageouts

the thing that caught my eye is the "267M used". I only had OSX running
with itunes (not playing music) and Internet Explorer running. Does it
make sense that these applications would total 267M of ram being used?
if so then i guess everything is HunkyDory

Im so happy, everything seems snappy but now im affraid it's gonna
slow down again well i'll keep everyone posted. you guys are great

 

[MacBandit]

Re: well i reformated

Originally posted by beatle888
and things seem snappier! but i didnt install any software yet.
I wanted to see how the system ran while in a "virgin" state.
here are my results from the terminal test i was suppose to run.

Processes: 38 total, 2 running, 36 sleeping... 91 threads 22:33:53
Load Avg: 0.48, 0.11, 0.06 CPU usage: 9.5% user, 9.5% sys, 81.0% idle
SharedLibs: num = 7, resident = 2.20M code, 196K data, 564K LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 2150, resident = 29.9M + 5.20M private, 56.3M shared
PhysMem: 43.7M wired, 93.7M active, 129M inactive, 267M used, 245M free
VM: 1.22G + 3.62M 8317(0) pageins, 88(0) pageouts

the thing that caught my eye is the "267M used". I only had OSX running
with itunes (not playing music) and Internet Explorer running. Does it
make sense that these applications would total 267M of ram being used?
if so then i guess everything is HunkyDory

Im so happy, everything seems snappy but now im affraid it's gonna
slow down again well i'll keep everyone posted. you guys are great

I just ran top on my tower and it said IE was taking 122MB so I would say that your ram usage is normal.

 

[beatle888]

Xbench results

This is my system after a reformat and a reinstall.
tibook 667, 512MB of ram, standard HD 30gigs, 16MB of Video ram.
OSX 10.2.1

The system that xbench uses as a comparison is a DP 800mhz which
has a score of 100.

Results 61.68
System Info
Xbench Version 1.0b2
System Version 10.2.1
Physical RAM 512 MB
Processor PowerPC,G4@0 [667 MHz]
CPU Test 80.08
GCD Recursion 69.97 2.73 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic 83.52 72.27 Mflop/sec
AltiVec Basic 91.22 470.83 Mflop/sec
Floating Point Library 75.60 3.40 Mops/sec
Thread Test 54.44
Computation 42.15 339.56 Kops/sec, 4 threads
Memory Contention 76.88 243.18 MB/sec, 2 threads
Lock Contention 44.28 555.83 Klocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test 65.05
System 53.60
Allocate 82.04 43.16 Kalloc/sec
Fill 31.84 182.56 MB/sec
Copy 46.92 281.49 MB/sec
Stream 76.50
Copy 74.56 298.22 MB/sec [altivec]
Scale 75.35 301.41 MB/sec [altivec]
Add 77.49 309.95 MB/sec [altivec]
Triad 78.61 314.46 MB/sec [altivec]
Quartz Graphics Test 68.11
Line 76.58 1.95 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle 63.95 4.50 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle 69.29 1.60 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier 68.87 748.37 beziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text 61.87 1.04 Kchars/sec
User Interface Test 59.11
Elements 59.11 18.92 refresh/sec
Disk Test 43.31
Sequential 41.46
Uncached Sequential Write 40.14 17.78 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Sequential Read 42.78 18.48 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 45.16
Uncached Random Write 40.69 9.56 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Random Read 49.62 9.97 MB/sec [256K blocks]

So from what i can tell, my system is pretty fast but the ram speed and
especially the hard disk speed causes a major performance penalty.
I'm sure I'm stuck with the ram results however I will be getting a fast
FireWire drive for my photoshop editing as soon as I can offord it.

P.S. my score was a HIGH 80 before it went into the ram and disk test...strange
apple would let ram and disk speed penalize a system like that.

Hope you guys like the test.

 

[buffsldr]

you are running out of ram, notice you have 88 page outs.

as far as why it shows you are using 200+mb, when you open 8 programs, and then close all 8 programs and run "top", os x still keeps some ram allocated to those programs.

i have 640 mb in my ibook (the maximum) and it is enough for my simple lap top, but I have 896 mb in my tower, and that is awesome. not because i get great performance, but because i can open a ton of programs and not worry about pageouts.

you bought a ti 667. why? it sounds like there is a contradiction here. you buy a pro laptop, but you dont load it with ram like a pro? what's up?

 

[beatle888]

hehe

well, i have 512MB of ram right now...Im trying to figure out how to get
the cash for a gig...i think i would benefit a great deal from getting a high
performance firewire drive. that should really help...even if i max this system
out with a gig of ram im still gonna need a fast scratch disk once tradeshow
season comes around. those posters and banners get huge.

 

[8thDegreeSavage]

Give your PRAM a zap at startup as welll


To do this....

Restart then hold down cmd-option+P+R until you hear your start up chime once or twice more....then let go and it will restart...this usually helps my comp clear out the cob webs.....dunno if it is really that effective..i usually do it after installing a major app or upgrading my OS.