I need some quick tips to make my old iMac SOAR! (nt)

Uduckhead

Uduckhead

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First and foremost: I am a mac noob. I've been using them since the original imacs, but I don't really know how to do that much in-depth stuff with it. Anyway:

With Tiger coming out, I've been wanting to really improve the efficiency of my old 800mhz iMac G4. I used System Optimizer, but I can't really tell if that did anything. Are there any quick tips or progs that could help just clean things up in general?

Thank you!
 
To make your iMac soar, you need two things - a gentle (10-20 km/hr) headwind, and an area with strong thermals.

Sorry, couldn't resist. One thing about RAM - supposedly there is a measurable increase in the performance of certain operations if your RAM is installed in matching sets - i.e. if you have two sticks (how many slots are there in a G4 iMac anyway), you want them to be the same size. Not a huge deal, probably, but it might be something to consider if you want to really tweak it up.

Aside from that, just run fewer services - e.g. go to the Sharing panel, and disable anything you don't really need...
 
Heh... the "paired RAM" trick only works on the G5 iMacs (and is required on the Power Mac G5 units).

Performance gains from adding a paired set of RAM in an iMac G4 will only be because of the increase in amount of RAM, not because the sticks are matched.
 
Back up all your data, and re-initialize your disk. Then install Tiger. This way you won't have any disk fragmentation, which can be a big performance killer. People say fragmentation isn't an issue with OS X, but that's not really true. Don't get me wrong, OS X does an admirable job trying to eliminate fragmentation, but there's only so much an OS can do. Your disk WILL get fragmented. And as soon as your OS can't store your virtual memory swap files in neat solid blocks (which happens to me after a month or two, usually), your performance is going to suffer.

For this reason, it can be a good idea to use multiple disk partitions. Use your system partition for what you need to (apps, etc.), and use your other partition for downloads and projects and stuff. Try to keep at least 4GB for VM files free on your system partition.

Of course, the more RAM you have, the less your system will need to hit its VM space, and the less of a difference this kind of optimization will make. It may well be more trouble than it's worth. I do recommend re-initializing your disk before Tiger, though.

Aside from that, all I can say is, install as much RAM as you can, and reboot now and again. Rebooting once a week or so seems like a good practice.

Oh, and you might want to try out some renice'ing apps. The performance benefit is slight at best, but hey, worth a look.
 
Uduckhead said:
With Tiger coming out, I've been wanting to really improve the efficiency of my old 800mhz iMac G4. I used System Optimizer, but I can't really tell if that did anything. Are there any quick tips or progs that could help just clean things up in general?
Click to expand...

You may have a RAM shortage. Are you having many, or excessively long spinning, SBBOSs? Are your having excessive pageouts? If yes to these questions, then, as mentioned, you may have a RAM shortage. If not, then adding RAM would not help noticeably if at all.

Shutting down once is a good idea. But, generally speaking, over a longish period of time, you can speed things up by not shutting down--to allow OS X to store more frequently called for instructions in its buffer cache.

Before defragmenting, I would read here. In extreme cases, defragmentation can enhance performance, but under normal circumstances it might acutally hurt performance.

I would do some basic maintenance/troubleshooting:

1. Empty the trash, and clear all browser caches;
2. Repair disk and repair permissions (go here);
3. Run the 3 periodic maintenance (cron) scripts (see above link);
4. Update the prebinding (see above link);
4. Use a program, such as Cocktail, to clear the system- and user-cache files; and
5. Use a program, such as Font Finagler or DeepSix, to purge font-cache files.

There are other maintenance task you could perform, such as checking for corrupt preference files and deleting log files, but those mentioned above should give you a good start on getting some basic maintenance/troubleshooting done.
 
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