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My iMac is slow... TOO slow

M

MrMarco

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 28, 2009
8
0
My PPC G4 iMac is slow as hell. I plan on upgrading soon enough to a newer iMac but in the meantime I'd love to recover some speed. I know i have a woefully low amount of RAM - 768 to be exact - but apparently I'm stuck with that. It was running better in the past but with time things just slowed to a crawl with minimal things open - Mail, Safari and maybe Word and Excel. I gave up trying to run PS Elements 3 on this machine. That just makes me want to scoop my eyes out with a spoon.

I run iClean regularly, I have my desktop clear of clutter. What can I do in the interim before I buy the new iMac to help things some? Or am I just S.O.L. and just be patient and wait for the new machine?
 
Do you have Tiger? or Leopard?

Perhaps back up your documents, wipe the drive, and reinstall Tiger to get some of that snappiness back?

Software Update will still support Tiger.

Also Office 2003 is perhaps faster than Office 2008.

You mentioned 4 apps, try having just one open at a time.

Perhaps change to Firefox, and run FlashBlock and AdBlock+
These are lifesavers for internet use on older computers.

Which iMac do you have? The G4's could take up to 1GB and sometimes 2GB. Check out the list here:

http://lowendmac.com/imacs/index.shtml

I run several older iBooks and a PowerBook - they're all doing fine.
 
How much free hard drive space do you have? What processor? And yeah, what operating system are you running?

I wouldn't call 768 MB "woeful", even these days.
 
i would call it woeful. especially under Photoshop.

spending 20$ to get more RAM would be a good thing to do.

check your hard drive free space and makes sure you have more than 15% free. run Onyx. Repair Permissions. do everything you can.

if you haven't, run all your system updates and make sure you aren't running 500 applications in dashboard, or for that matter, anywhere behind photoshop.

you can disable a lot of things in OS X to make things run faster. i.e animations, wallpaper, anything that takes up memory.

try using TinkerTool!


it would help though, with more information. maybe a fresh install of OS X would help?
 
Onyx can disable dashboard too. I do it for all the macs I work on ( after checking that the user doesn't use Dashboard of course!)

EDIT: Tinkertoo can do this too. Turn off sounds, 3D effects etc etc.

ALSO: Go to System Preferences / Accounts / and check Login Items to make sure that you aren't autoloading various apps when you start up.
 
Not sure where the idea comes from that Dashboard takes up processing cycles when it hasn't been invoked. I never see it in the Activity Monitor when it hasn't been run.

My presumption in this case is the amount of physical RAM is the cause of slowdowns. I'd suggest restarting the Mac. If it seems to run faster for a while afterwards, then that's your problem. If it doesn't, then we move to the next step (which is not reinstalling OSX).
 
RedTomato said:
Do you have Tiger? or Leopard?

Perhaps back up your documents, wipe the drive, and reinstall Tiger to get some of that snappiness back?

Software Update will still support Tiger.

Also Office 2003 is perhaps faster than Office 2008.

You mentioned 4 apps, try having just one open at a time.

Perhaps change to Firefox, and run FlashBlock and AdBlock+
These are lifesavers for internet use on older computers.

Which iMac do you have? The G4's could take up to 1GB and sometimes 2GB. Check out the list here:

http://lowendmac.com/imacs/index.shtml

I run several older iBooks and a PowerBook - they're all doing fine.
Click to expand...

I totally agree with going back to tiger on older systems. Leopard is just a lot slower especially with quartz. I've had machines where the genie and scale effect where butter smooth in tiger but in leopard they were just choppy and didn't look nearly as good. Even expose is not as snappy. I am hoping snow leopard is a bit quicker but I doubt it will even run on this meachines since its rumored that PPC support will be cut.
 
Just to add another speed bump that worked for my iMac was disabling beamsync.

type this in terminal

Code: 
sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.windowserver Compositor -dict deferredUpdates 0

gave me a nice boost of snappiness in expose and the dock effects
 
IJ Reilly said:
Not sure where the idea comes from that Dashboard takes up processing cycles when it hasn't been invoked. I never see it in the Activity Monitor when it hasn't been run.
Click to expand...

Not sure where you got that idea from either. I disable Dashboard partly to save on RAM, and partly just on general principles that older machines like to have fewer things going on inside them. And sometimes people activate Dashboard by accident.

Impacts on RAM / processor may vary depending on which dashboard apps have been installed.

My presumption in this case is the amount of physical RAM is the cause of slowdowns. I'd suggest restarting the Mac. If it seems to run faster for a while afterwards, then that's your problem. If it doesn't, then we move to the next step.
Click to expand...

Good suggestion, and useful diagnostic tip. Wouldn't work if startup / login items happened to be full of junk. So clear these out first.
 
yeah disabling dashboard is a good idea. i regularly disable it to save battery on my MacBook or if i'm watching an HD movie on my Mac Mini. Since the mini is lower spec'd, it usually plays within the 80%-135% range so not running a bunch of things is a great idea.
 
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