[G4] upgrade or buy new mac?

[jonseward at mindspring.com]

Have you tried emptying your caches, running Disk Utility to repair
permissions, and purging Libraries?  I had a 
similar problem with Safari a while back - slowed down like molasses - did
the tasks above and it's spiffy quick now.

Also do you have more than 10% of your hard drive space free?  As you
approach it, your CPU has to work a lot 
harder to find places to put all those bytes that are in motion, and that
can slow things down tremendously, cause 
crashes, kernel panics and data loss/corruption.  Drive are pretty cheap
these days.  Put in an additional drive for 
storage, backups, cache locations, etc. and you can free up a lot of room
on your primary/boot drive.

The best performance value investment for an old Mac is to max out your
RAM.  So fill up those slots with the largest 
capacity sticks (of the appropriate specs) of RAM.  Also pretty cheap these
days.

Lastly, some applications don't dynamically assign memory to meet the
immediate demand.  Look in the applications 
Preferences menu to see if you need to bump up the assigned memory.  You
might also open the Get Information 
function (Apple-i clicking on the application's icon [not alias!]) and see
if it also mentions memory assignment.

More lastly:  I use Earthlink as my email provider and access my emails via
webmail, and I've noticed that it has 
recently tends to to be more finicky and responds more slowly - to the
point that it doesn't recognize addresses and 
commands.  Sometimes this seems to happen at times when demand on the
internet might be particularly high.  
Your issues may not be entirely internal.


HTH,


Jon




Original Message:
-----------------
From: Brad Russell braddrussell at yahoo.com
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 2008 17:28:41 -0800 (PST)
To: g4 at listserver.themacintoshguy.com
Subject: [G4] upgrade or buy new mac?


Thanks for all the replies to my e-mail about upgrading or replacing my
DP500.  I think I should clarify a few things.

When I complained about sluggishness when scrolling through e-mail;
specifically, when I scroll from message to 
message in my inbox is when it is less responsive - not when scrolling
within a message.  Right now I'm using yahoo 
web mail with Firefox or Safari.  I would think the 9200 is up to that
task- maybe not?

Also, I never thought I would buy a new a new Mac.  I was hoping to stay
below $500.  So I guess given that as a 
loose budget, am I better of with a new old Mac or a processor upgrade.  
And if so which one would be the best 
bang for the buck that would allow me to surf decently,  use the new iPhoto
and MS Office?  Are there real 
advantages to a Mirrored Door or would a dual 867 be ok?


Thanks!

Brad






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