Leopard bechballs on an older iMac G4

[j-a-x]

I installed Leopard on my 700 mhz iMac G4. I know Leopard doesn't officially support this machine, but I used LeopardAssist to install it. I figured the machine has enough ram (1 gig) and a CoreImage supported graphics card, so it should run good enough for simple email and web browsing. I wanted Leopard on this machine instead of Tiger so I would have the same OS as my other macs (it's easier to troubleshoot when you have the same OS on multiple machines).

THe only problem seems to be that I keep getting the spinning beach ball every 30 seconds or so and it lasts for 5 seconds and locks up the system while it's spinning.

These beach balls don't appear to be related to low RAM (the system is not paging, and 1 gig seems to be enough to run Mail and Safari).

Does anybody have any idea what might be causing this or how to reduce the number of beach balls? I can't relate them to any one system process or anything in specific.

Any tips to make LEopard run better on an old system would be much appreciated.

 

[Schtumple]

Aside from the obvious repair disk permission, running onyx cleanup scripts, there's not much more I know of that will help.

 

[Shake 'n' Bake]

Repair permissions, maybe reset PRAM, though it probably won't help. The problem is you're running Leopard on a 700 MHz machine.

 

[DoFoT9]

all good suggestions so far, make sure you have enough free HD space for VM and the like.

my guess is that its just too old and the RAM too slow.

 

[MacDawg]

my guess is that its just too old and the RAM too slow.

Yep... I am guessing that is part of the reason it is not supported

Woof, Woof - Dawg

 

[j-a-x]

I've definitely got enough disk space, done the permission repair, diskwarrior, all that stuff. I haven't tried PRAM yet but I'm not sure it'll help. Interestingly between the beach balls the system is VERY usable. The RAM however is SLOW old PC133 SDRAM so maybe even with a gig of it the ram and the system bus are too slow to keep up.

Unfortunately I threw away my Tiger CD!! AHh! Gotta think about how to downgrade or whether to keep it running leopard.

It's actually my mom's computer and I thought if I had it running Leopard it would be easier for me the troubleshoot it from a distance using screen sharing in iChat (so much nicer than using VNV through her router/firewall).

Anyways, thanks for the suggestions.

 

[Echoes]

Leopard runs just fine on my iMac G4. It's a 1 GHz with 1.5 GB of DDR RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 4 MX graphics chip. I guess the DDR and the graphics make a big difference in this case.

I mostly see beachballs and freezes while surfing sites with Flash content. I can barely watch a video on Youtube. Adobe Flash on Mac OS X is an aberration. The proof these guys (Macromedia then Adobe) don't have a clue on how to code on the Mac.

Apart from that, everything runs quite smoothly.

 

[instaxgirl]

Leopard runs just fine on my iMac G4. It's a 1 GHz with 1.5 GB of DDR RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 4 MX graphics chip. I guess the DDR and the graphics make a big difference in this case.

I mostly see beachballs and freezes while surfing sites with Flash content. I can barely watch a video on Youtube. Adobe Flash on Mac OS X is an aberration. The proof these guys (Macromedia then Adobe) don't have a clue on how to code on the Mac.

Apart from that, everything runs quite smoothly.

There's plugins that stop flash loading. I have one installed with Safari but I forget what it's called. A quick search on Mroogle or Google should find it for you though.

 

[j-a-x]

I just acquired an old copy of Tiger and did a clean install (wiped the drive clean) and things seem more reasonable with Tiger, so I guess the old hardware with a slow bus and slow RAM probably caused the poor Leopard performance. I'd guess that the next generation of G4 iMac would have worked fine in Leopard though.

Thanks for the input guys.

 

[Sun Baked]

Turn off spotlight. Might have run into an indexing issue.