Speed up iMac G4

[iMaclover1]

Hi there.

I have recently upgraded my imac g4's ram from 256mb to 512mb and i can say that it is much faster that it used to be. I was told to download TenFourFox and Mactubes. Mactubes runs ok when using quicktime but TenFourFox is really slow.

Is there anything that i could do to make my g4 faster? And is there any good free applications that i could download? My mac is a g4 PPC, 700mhz, 512mb ram.

Thanks!

 

[gooser]

the most cost effective way you can speed it up is to buy a 1.25ghz imac and sell the 700. total cost of upgrade? $50 to $100.

 

[gavinstubbs09]

Hi there.

I have recently upgraded my imac g4's ram from 256mb to 512mb and i can say that it is much faster that it used to be. I was told to download TenFourFox and Mactubes. Mactubes runs ok when using quicktime but TenFourFox is really slow.

Is there anything that i could do to make my g4 faster? And is there any good free applications that i could download? My mac is a g4 PPC, 700mhz, 512mb ram.

Thanks!

Are you running leopard? My 800MHz has leopard and the first things I did to make it way faster was disable spotlight and dashboard. From there I disabled a bunch of graphical stuff. I could live with it if I had to, but if that was the case it would just get Tiger put on it.

 

[eyoungren]

the most cost effective way you can speed it up is to buy a 1.25ghz imac and sell the 700. total cost of upgrade? $50 to $100.

Seriously?

You're telling the OP to just buy a new Mac?

Sorry, no, it's the normal culprits that will help.

OP, I don't know what the capacity of your iMac is, but surely it supports at least 1GB of ram? If it supports more, max it out. A new hard drive can help too. The newer one's don't spin as fast, but they have larger buffers and can deliver data faster.

As to T4Fx, the browser is the same as Firefox. What this means is that you can tweak settings. Do a Google search for "speed up firefox" and you'll get a bunch of results telling you how you can modify things in about:config.

Also, do you have the correct version of T4Fx? It comes in four versions. One for the G3, one for the 7400 G4 and one for the 7450 G4 and one for the G5.

If you are not using the right version (7450 in your case) that can hinder the performance of T4Fx.

 

[iMaclover1]

Are you running leopard? My 800MHz has leopard and the first things I did to make it way faster was disable spotlight and dashboard. From there I disabled a bunch of graphical stuff. I could live with it if I had to, but if that was the case it would just get Tiger put on it.

Hi there. I am running tiger 10.4.11. How do you disable spotlight and dashboard?

Thanks.

 

[eyoungren]

Hi there. I am running tiger 10.4.11. How do you disable spotlight and dashboard?

Thanks.

You can still do that on Tiger. Download Onyx for Tiger and in the Parameters area find the tabs for Dashboard and Spotlight and disable.

Note that when you disable Spotlight you are essentially killing your ability to search for files/folders on your Mac. A CMD+F for find won't give you any search results.

 

[DeltaMac]

The iMac G4/700 MHz has two PC-133 RAM slots, each with a max of 512MB - so 1 GB is max. One chip (which is a SODIMM) is easy, simply removing the metal access cover on the bottom. The challenge is getting to the second internal RAM slot, requiring taking the case apart, and also takes a full size SDRAM chip.

I also would likely stay with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) on that system.
10.5 is not directly installable, as the processor is under the system requirements for processor speed (min is 867 MHz for Leopard)

I like the older iMacs - as there's one advantage (for me, anyway) - it will boot natively into Mac OS 9, if you have some need for that.

 

[iMaclover1]

Hi. I have upgraded the internal ram and not the user accessible ram. I have TenFourFox 7450. I will have a look and see if i can get Onyx for tiger. It it free?
I will disable the Dashboard and not spotlight as i think that i might use it.

Thanks.

 

[eyoungren]

Hi. I have upgraded the internal ram and not the user accessible ram. I have TenFourFox 7450. I will have a look and see if i can get Onyx for tiger. It it free?
I will disable the Dashboard and not spotlight as i think that i might use it.

Thanks.

Onyx is free, yes. Just do a Google search and it should come right up.

 

[iMaclover1]

Onyx is free, yes. Just do a Google search and it should come right up.

Hi there. I have download onyx and cleared some files. I also used terminal to disable the dashboard and i have seen a bit of a performance improvement but i downloaded TenFourFox and it is EXTREMELY slow in starting up and just using it in general. Is there a way that i can speed it up? I will try and buy another 512mb of ram and see if that does anything.

Thanks

 

[eyoungren]

Hi there. I have download onyx and cleared some files. I also used terminal to disable the dashboard and i have seen a bit of a performance improvement but i downloaded TenFourFox and it is EXTREMELY slow in starting up and just using it in general. Is there a way that i can speed it up? I will try and buy another 512mb of ram and see if that does anything.

Thanks

T4FX is, has been, and probably will always be slow to startup. It's all the workaround code that is required to get what is essentially Firefox working on PowerPC Macs. If you did not already know, Mozilla abandoned PowerPC with version 4.x of Firefox. That's why TenFourFox is so important.

In any case, because T4Fx is a port of Firefox, you can edit it just like Firefox. Do a Google search for slow firefox, firefox high cpu, speed up firefox, and any other terms you can think of. You'll get back a bunch of results that will show you which parameters need to be modified in about:config

All of this said, however, just like Firefox, T4Fx is a memory hog. Later versions are better, but it still hogs memory. The less memory you have the slower TenFourFox is going to be. So, maxing your ram if you can would be good.

To give you an example, on my Macs I tend to run just TenFourFox by itself. With all of my optimizations, T4Fx still hogs anywhere from 1.09GB to 1.4GB on Macs that have from 1.5 to 2GB of ram. So, a good idea is to not run other apps when you have T4Fx open.