MAC OSX 10.2.2 Newbie

E

edespiritu

Registered
We recently upgraded two out of our four G4s to Mac OSX 10.2.2. We currently run at 450 MHz with 256 MB RAM. Our major applications are Quark 5.0/Pagemaker 7.0/Illustrator 10/Photoshop 7.0. One G4 has Macromedia Studio MX. Our G4s have slowed down a bit and we have had discussions as to whether or not we should upgrade RAM and/or our processors. There is even a suggestion to purchase a Sonnet 800 MHz or 1 GHz processor upgrade, which I'm not familiar with (it's listed as an "Encore ST for G4/AGP" at www.mac-upgrade.com/article_157.shtml).

Is this a simple request for additional RAM or should we seriously consider the purchase of a new processor/upgrade?
 
edespiritu, I would max out the Ram. You use applications that under OS 9 were more content with just 256MB of Ram. OS X alone required 128 MB which leaves little to Photoshop etc.

I would also suggest purchasing a ATI Radeon 7000 or 8000 graphics card for your macs. They have more onboard memory and allow Quartz, the rendering component of OSX run faster. I have had good experiences with the card although you won't find a huge speed increase in desktop operations. The cards run at $70 - $200 each I believe.

I have not ever used upgrade cards such as the Sonnet so I can't share any experiences. Maybe someone here will be able to tell you if its worth the hefty upgrade price.

G
 
I've never seen vast improvements with upgrade cards on older machines such as G3s in 7500s etc, but since your G4 isn't all that old you won't have too much bottlenecks due to bus speed if you do upgrade. I would think that more RAM would be a far more cost effective option though. You could do with 512 as a minimum really. OS X likes its memory.

A Quartz Extreme compatible graphics card would help, if you don't already have one, and the faster the better if you have, but again, more RAM first!

How are you getting on using Quark under 10.2? We always had problems to the extent that we run 9.2 at work and at home I've jumped ship and use InDesign, unless I'm specifically doing stuff that's gotta go through an image/platesetter.
 
We've been running Quark 5.0, through Classic.
However, our Quark specialist hasn't converted to OSX just yet.

Thanks for the input.
 
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