Tibook spinning beachball

[California]

I'm holding on to my ancient 400mhz Tibook because Apple basically replaced all of its components -- logic board, middle case, trackpad, everythiing but the screen, which is great, before warranty ran out last August.

I love the machine. I maxed to 1gig of ram and a 5400rpm 40gig travelstar hd.

I upgraded to Panther and the only thing that is bugging me at moment is that I am getting the spinning beachball way too much.

I don't game. I use Word and surf the internet. That's it! Is my machine just too slow? I'm only using about 9gigs of the hard drive space -- so why do I have this beach ball delay on websites and even when I use Word?

Very frustrating. Any clues or ideas appreciated. I could upgrade CPU to 550 through Daystar (chickened out at last minute as I don't like shipping my pristine machine across the country). Or should I get a faster 7200 rpm HD maybe?

 

[IJ Reilly]

Before you give up on it (a G4/400 isn't that slow), I'd try repairing permissions. Performance often deteriorates as permissions rot, and they always rot.

Also, run the activity monitor for a while, with the Dock icon set to CPU usage. This will give you some idea where the clock cycles are going.

 

[point665]

Empty your cache and such, empty your font cache using Font Fingler (spelling?)... Repair your permissions...