mac is slow

cyprus mac man

cyprus mac man

Expert Macintosh...er
hey, my Powerbook G4 is very slow. it slow to load different users and programes sometimes. me and my dad share the comp and we have loads of gbs of music. we have about 6 gb left in our 80 gb HD. our RAM is 512 mb and it has a 1.5ghz processor. a little while ago we brought it in because 50% of the RAM wasnt being read and we had a fatile HD error and lots most of our stuff.

i try cleaning up our computer . also, should i backup the music to data DVDs and delete them from the HD?? but im afrade if the DVD gets messed up...i dont know what to do. when i come back to the US (im in CYprus right now) im gana buy an external HD to back up too...hopefully that wont crash and fail too!!

Any help or advise would be great
 
A rule of thumb is that you should have 10% of your hard drive capacity as free space. This gives the virtual memory system enough room to do its job. Insufficient virtual memory space can degrade performance.
 
You forgot to mention which operating system you are using. 512MB is on the low side for Tiger. Also I'm not clear on the "slow ... sometimes". Do you mean that it is quite fast doing the same things, sometimes? In other words, it's an intermittent problem? What's a futile HD error?

It would be better if you could run a specific speed test.

I would definitely consider backing up your music files if you haven't already! You can get up to 4.3GB of data on a DVD.

If you make two copies of everything that matters and make sure the copies are readable, then it will be safe to erase files off the HD to free up some working space. You are down to 7.5% free space, which isn't likely to be contiguous, so you need more.
 
When logging in, my menu bar will usually take several minutes to load. Then, after loading, it will take another few seconds to load the precent of battery left.

Also, I get that little spinning color wheel when I am loging out and logning in. It will stay on usually for a minute.

Thanks for the advice and I will begin to backup my system tonight.
 
There's no need to back up the operating system. Just backup the irreplaceable files.

(You still forgot to mention your Operating system version.)
 
My brother-in-law told me yesterday "I finally got a gig of RAM for my Powerbook G4. So I can word decently with it now."

He has similar specs like, so you might want to consider pimping your RAM
 
i looked into that. one place said they would give me a total of 2GB for like less than $500 including installation. my friend has 768mb or something (512md stick + 256 mb stick). I could also get that or just the 1 GB. maybe when I get back to the states with some money.

also, if I was backing up my data to an external HD, how reliable are they. I read a review that one crashed at took out the mac's HD with it. just wondering.

Thanks a lot
 
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