[Ti] Slow as molasses lately...

[Wilhelm Wanders]

I run a PB G4/400 384MB 10GB OS 10.3 (Panther)

I usually run Mail, Safari, Carrafix (app to control bandwith) and 
BitTorrent (Filesharing) simultaneously. Occassionally I run Photoshop 
and Golive additionally as well as other heavy duty tasks, like 
watching a movie via VLC a.s.o.

When I was running Jaguar I read on the net, that Panther was supposed 
to be faster than Jaguar - even on older machines like mine. So I gave 
it a try (copying my existing OS on an ext. drive first - as emergency 
backup)
and voilà ... it really runs much faster and more reliable. I think it 
has much better memory handling (i have a little app telling me how 
much RAM i have left unwired/free, 'cause i just have 384 .. which is 
far not enough)
Safari can be a pain and a real memory eater .... especially after it 
has been open for a while. there are lot of other projects out there 
(like firefox), but i still stick with safari, i restart it some more 
often .....
after the last update to 10.3.4 apps are opening faster and safari got 
a little better i think (behaviour-wise)
all in all ... computer start-up time is faster (35 seconds), shut down 
time is way cool with under 10 seconds
i think this will be the last essential OS update for my G4 - but I am 
really happy with it running like it does .....
so my recommondation is a clean install of panther =)

On Jun 14, 2004, at 12:25 AM, Gary Mark wrote:

> Okay here's what I'm running:
>
> PB G4/400 640MB 40G OS 10.2 (Jaguar) Usually run Mail, Safari, Acrobat 
> Reader and Graphic Converter simultaneously and others on occasion.
>
> Lately, Mail and Safari have been 'spinning the hard drive' and 
> spinning the beach ball between requests.  It's really bogging down my 
> productivity to wait for these cycles.  What is going on?  Why does 
> the OS/application need to access the the disk so much?