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Slow powermac g5

L

LJ280

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 25, 2013
3
0
Hi everyone :) I have a Power Mac G5 1.8 GHz single core with 2 GB of RAM And a ATI radeon 800 XT graphics card.
I'm running it on a 17 inch Apple LCD monitor and it is very slow and lags noticeably watching DVDs and In general. Even the screen saver.

Running OS X 10.2.8 right now. Was wondering if you had and ideas? I zapped the P-RAM it helped a little.
 
You should at least upgrade to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther or Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, maybe even Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, as 10.2 is quite not a finished version of Mac OS X.

Hopefully you can find the following useful albeit your outdated Mac OS X version.

Open Activity Monitor and select All Processes and then sort by CPU to show you the process(es) slowing down your Mac, and also go to the System Memory* tab and look for Page Outs and Swap used and report back.

If you want to enhance the performance of your Mac, be sure to check these two articles, do not just use applications, that promise to do it for you.
 
Faster HDD, more RAM, clean 10.4.11 OS X. You already have good graphics card for AGP G5.
When you pgrade, you can install Leopard 10.5.8
 
10.2? That might be your problem. I have a late 2004 1.8Ghz PowerMac G5 and the original OS on that system was 10.3.1. So, not sure if 10.2 should even be on your G5 anyway.

I any case, boot from the install disk. Repair permissions, repair disk. If you have a copy of DiskWarrior, boot from that and run it too.

I'd also track down an old copy of Onyx for 10.2. Run the Daily, Weekly and Monthly Scripts, clean caches, etc. That should improve performance.

But as others have said, 10.2 is pretty old, so I would update. My G5 has 4GB of ram and it flys on Leopard. So you would benefit from increasing the ram.
 
Sure. But what if the caches are corrupt? I'm not recommending it as an everyday thing, but as a general troubleshooting method.
 
bax2003 said:
Faster HDD, more RAM, clean 10.4.11 OS X. You already have good graphics card for AGP G5.
Click to expand...

This. Get another 2GB of RAM, faster (preferably new) HDD and look for cheap copy of 10.4.
If you can live with 10.2.8 nowadays, you don't need 10.5 :)
 
What everyone else said.

I never noticed any decrease in performance when using Leopard instead of Tiger, but anything older than Leopard, and you won't be getting the best performance from your Mac. Also, dump Intel code with Xslimmer or by using any of the freeware apps that do the job.

With Leopard, you can use browsers and other apps optimized for your Mac.
 
Thank you everybody :)
I've Managed to find a cheap copy of osx 10.3.
I'll look for some ram and a new hard drive as well.
 
Last edited:
It's a little hard to find out here.
I ran 10.3.6 off my iMac g3 for the longest time.
I might try and find 10.5 if I can

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Everywhere I can find just sells intel junk, I guess I'll try eBay or amazon.
 
LJ280 said:
It's a little hard to find out here.
I ran 10.3.6 off my iMac g3 for the longest time.
I might try and find 10.5 if I can

----------

Everywhere I can find just sells intel junk, I guess I'll try eBay or amazon.
Click to expand...
Search for the retail disk. The retail disk is Universal.
 
LJ280 said:
It's a little hard to find out here.
I ran 10.3.6 off my iMac g3 for the longest time.
I might try and find 10.5 if I can

----------

Everywhere I can find just sells intel junk, I guess I'll try eBay or amazon.
Click to expand...

If you haven't found a copy yet message me.
 
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