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PC to Mac Converter's First 3 months...

A

About2SwitchOvr

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 22, 2004
150
0
Boston
Hello all,

I transferred over to Mac, mainly because of it's styling and beautiful screen.
This may sound superficial, but, that is what I was mainly using it for. I do not program, I do not engage in high quality graphic rendering, nor any other high processor-eating acts.

I ended up buying a brand new iMac 20" and upgraded the ram to 768 ram.
I have cable modem hooked up (hard-wired).

I love everything about this computer because it met all my wishes.

The only peev I have about this, is simply the slow internet navigation.

After reading the forums, I ended up using Camino, which has faired faster than Safari. But I use "faster" in relative terms. Compared to PC machines (windows based), internet travel is considerably slower.
Again, after reading the forums I figured out that I have to (simply put) sacrifice internet speed, for image quality.

My question is, what do all the other Mac users do about their internet surfing needs? I hear that Tiger has a solution for this problem, but none of their broadcasts advertise this, which I thought would be a big kicker.

I would appreciate any input!

Thanks!
 
I found no real difference in speed...in fact Safari feels a bit faster.

I have read somewhere that Firefox is pretty quick and well featured.
 
No difference between internet speed??

aswitcher said:
I found no real difference in speed...in fact Safari feels a bit faster.

I have read somewhere that Firefox is pretty quick and well featured.
Click to expand...

Just so I understand correctly, you can candidly say that surfing the SAME websites with the SAME connection on SIMILARLY equipped machines (ie: iMac G4 1.25 gig vs, P4 WIN XP 1.8 gig machine) are the same?

The specific problem I run into, is that it simply takes longer for Camino and Safari to load pages (ebay, morningstar, even apple's website, etc)...

Now, please don't get me wrong, I don't mean to emphasize the one negative of this beautiful Mac, it's just human nature, I guess.

I appreciate you guys taking time to reply to this post... :)
 
Same websites, similar machine, my PB 667 spanks the Windows XP Dell 2Ghz that I've got access to. Both are on cable modems.

Don't know what to tell you. Try repairing permissions, clear the cache(s) and cookies before zapping the pram. Try MacJanitor - it's freeware, it runs a couple of Unix scripts that likely aren't being run on your machine. Zapping the pram might help, but try that as a last resort.

I have had cookie and cache problems in the past - but it's an easy fix.
 
bubbamac said:
Same websites, similar machine, my PB 667 spanks the Windows XP Dell 2Ghz that I've got access to. Both are on cable modems.

Don't know what to tell you. Try repairing permissions, clear the cache(s) and cookies before zapping the pram. Try MacJanitor - it's freeware, it runs a couple of Unix scripts that likely aren't being run on your machine. Zapping the pram might help, but try that as a last resort.

I have had cookie and cache problems in the past - but it's an easy fix.
Click to expand...

Ok... I don't know what "zap the pram" means, but would entertain the meaning! :p
Also, I'm definitely into little apps that make the mac more efficient and "cooler", but have this need to know what I'm installing. So the second question is, what does MacJanitor do? What kind of scripts does it run?
 
About2SwitchOvr said:
Ok... I don't know what "zap the pram" means, but would entertain the meaning! :p
Also, I'm definitely into little apps that make the mac more efficient and "cooler", but have this need to know what I'm installing. So the second question is, what does MacJanitor do? What kind of scripts does it run?
Click to expand...

Ok.. I downloaded MacJanitor, curiosity got the best of me! :)

I would still love to see if it really has helped you. I am in the midst of messing around with it now...
 
About2SwitchOvr said:
Ok.. I downloaded MacJanitor, curiosity got the best of me! :)

I would still love to see if it really has helped you. I am in the midst of messing around with it now...
Click to expand...

Anotherone to try is ONYX as it does more than Macjanitor.
 
if you leave your computer on all night, putting it to sleep does not count, your computer runs automated 'cron' jobs which help improve speed, ect ect, but they are automatically set to be done in the middle of the night, so if you put your computer to sleep, or turn it off at night MacJanitor will run these for you so that they get done, you might want to check for OnyX as well, does the same thing and also lets you tweak some features of OS X that are not readily availible, both are good apps and are safe, try macupdate or versiontracker for them

~Tim
 
sometimes my girlfriends 1ghz + machine is faster than my 667mhz laptop and other times (on the same type of sites) mine is faster. if your using panther you can get Panther Cache Cleaner at versiontracker.com and it will automatically optimize your high bandwidth settings...i dont know if it will make a difference though.


quick note: my computer was running really slow a while ago and i decided to free some disk space....it really increased the speed of my system....as if it was new. the hard drive was nearly full...about three gigs left. I guess osx needs a lot of breathing room when it comes to empty disk space. make sure you have at least six gigs of available space on the disk that has the OS on it for optimum performance (this is just MY experience).
 
I can always count on this forum...

beatle888 said:
sometimes my girlfriends 1ghz + machine is faster than my 667mhz laptop and other times (on the same type of sites) mine is faster. if your using panther you can get Panther Cache Cleaner at versiontracker.com and it will automatically optimize your high bandwidth settings...i dont know if it will make a difference though.
Click to expand...

I just clicked on MacJanitor's DAILY button, and it did some "stuff".
Maybe it's a psychological thing, but the computer DOES feel abit quicker/efficient.
I will need to read more about it tomorrow, but I just wanted to thank you guys for the ***istance...

This forum and its' members have made my transition VERY smooth, and more importantly... fun.
Thanks!
 
I have not noticed a real slowdown with internet on my PowerMac dual G4 1.25GHz versus my PC AthlonXP 2400+ (single 2GHz). Mac has the Radeon 9000 Pro I believe, PC has Radeon 9200. Mac has 1GB RAM, PC has 512MB (same speed RAM on both).

In fact, the macrumors.org site feels like it loads faster in MacOS X 10.3.5 with Camino 0.8.1 compared to my PC running Windows 2000 sp4 with Mozilla 1.7.2, but overall I don't feel any difference (positive or negative) in browsing speed.

And straight downloading seems to be about the same. On my PC I can pull around 150KB/s on my DSL. On my Mac I've seen it up to about 146KB/s, which I consider to be awfully close. :D
 
reset the connection. High speed internet is super-fussy, particularly cable modems. Make sure you turn off your router at the same time and don't plug it back in until the cable modem has come back on completely (all the lights are green or whatever). ALso cable modems take like 45-60 seconds of being unplugged to reset. I have had problems where the router is more friendly to one computer then I reset it and it loses its prejudices.
 
some forum have java or script run and scroll slow against PC, for example, i go to a chinese forum site, safari handle it poorly and slowly... i don't understand why either... but some english site is the same as well... it scroll slow and load slow as well... i have no solution... anyone can explain why this is happening on a powerbook rev.a?
 
SLJ said:
some forum have java or script run and scroll slow against PC, for example, i go to a chinese forum site, safari handle it poorly and slowly... i don't understand why either... but some english site is the same as well... it scroll slow and load slow as well... i have no solution... anyone can explain why this is happening on a powerbook rev.a?
Click to expand...
Javascript, safari 1.3 will fix this hopefully.
 
about MacJanitor...

Please excuse me, if these are stupid questions:

1) I don't need to keep MacJanitor open, correct? I just have it on the dock.
2) If I want to run this cleanup manually, I can simply click on the "Daily" button, correct?

I guess, the real question is, I don't understand what the "Daily", "Weekly", "Monthly", "All Tasks" buttons mean. Can someone shed some light?

Thanks!
 
It's true, those buttons should be labelled better.

At around 3 AM each day, OS X runs a number of tasks involving cleaning up after itself. If your computer is asleep or off during this time, the tasks don't get run.

OS X runs a specific set of things every day, every week (I believe on Saturdays) and every month (30 days since the last time). Clicking the buttons direct it to run its set of "daily", "weekly" and "monthly" housekeeping chores.

As for the speed issue, Safari on my iMac (800 MHz, 768 MB RAM) is faster than almost any PC I've ever used, even on faster connections. Camino 0.8 is UNQUESTIONABLY faster than any PC browser, in my experience. Not sure where the slowdown could be; most of the Mac browsers are unbelievably fast.
 
cron tasks

I did read somewhere what each of the periodic cron tasks is for, but I can't recall where. Essentially, though, they do system cleanup of temporary files, trimming log files so they don't gobble up the entire drive, etc.

If you have Windows and especially Norton Utilities/SystemWorks experience, think of it as being similar to CleanSweep, but built into the OS not a 3rd party add-on. Of course, over time if the scripts are not run, then when you do run them you're likely to see a boost in system performance, which can make it feel almost like you've run SpeedDisk also.
 
It only seems slower it think. On my safari, it takes longer than windows but when safari loads the page the entire page is finished. In windows IE the page comes up right away but its still loading graphics and such. I remember somebody posting a script that made safari display the page and load it at the same time.
 
Ok, this all makes sense...

daveway00 said:
It only seems slower it think. On my safari, it takes longer than windows but when safari loads the page the entire page is finished. In windows IE the page comes up right away but its still loading graphics and such. I remember somebody posting a script that made safari display the page and load it at the same time.
Click to expand...

After thinking about it, I do think it FEELS slower, but in reality... a Loaded page probably takes the same time, compared to the PC...

Would it be detrimental to run the "Monthly" cleanup more often than just every month? (just curious)
 
About2SwitchOvr said:
After thinking about it, I do think it FEELS slower, but in reality... a Loaded page probably takes the same time, compared to the PC...

Would it be detrimental to run the "Monthly" cleanup more often than just every month? (just curious)
Click to expand...
Safari has a set timeout that displays the page after a set time to prevent the flashing effect that when a page is partially loaded, if you display it, and then load something that changes the display dramatically, the whole thing needs to be redrawn again (flash) so it waits until all the needed resources are loaded then starts to display the page, so it feels slower, but its probably just the same (compare download speed of a large file). The only thing that might be trully faster is Javascript on IE at this point.

Its really a design decision, and if you use the script to change the timout, you should see the same behavior as Windows IE.
 
This makes a lot of sense....

Fukui said:
Safari has a set timeout that displays the page after a set time to prevent the flashing effect that when a page is partially loaded, if you display it, and then load something that changes the display dramatically, the whole thing needs to be redrawn again (flash) so it waits until all the needed resources are loaded then starts to display the page, so it feels slower, but its probably just the same (compare download speed of a large file). The only thing that might be trully faster is Javascript on IE at this point.

Its really a design decision, and if you use the script to change the timout, you should see the same behavior as Windows IE.
Click to expand...


I definitely see what you're saying... thanks for the input everyone..

-chris
 
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