[X4U] How stable is 10.4.8?

[Robert MacLeay]

I have a Blue & White with an XLR8 G4 550MHz upgrade.  I have 1 GB of RAM.
Radeon 7000 video card.  Zero issues.

I run Adobe CS1, primarily InDesign and Photoshop, at home, and CS2 on a
dual 2GHz G5 at a client's.  While the the G5 is certainly more responsive,
it is no night-and-day difference.  I am quite productive with the upgraded
B&W.

Where the B&W-G4 fails is in anything relating to video. It drops frames all
over the place, and is essentially useless for anything more demanding than
playing avis out of my digital camera.

My main annoyance is frequent beachball waits when switching between the
several major productivity applications I always have open simultaneously.
This is a RAM problem; there isn't enough, even though I am maxed out.
(More RAM is the obvious solution, but having more than 2 GB of RAM equals
buying a G5, not financially practical.)

One thing I tried in order to speed things up was to install a SATA RAID, on
the premise that disk access was one of the reasons for beachballs.  I had
seen glowing reports of fantastic disk transfer rates with striped RAID
arrays and hoped that this would ease the bottleneck.  This was a bitter
disappointment.  OS X has built-in RAID support and creating a striped array
was no more difficult than formatting a single drive.  The speed gains I had
hoped for simply did not materialize; Read was about 50% faster, but I saw
no improvement at all in write speeds.  Worst of all, the Mac would not boot
off the RAID.  When I deleted the RAID and reformatted as a pair of single
disks, I was pleased to discover that used individually, the SATA disks
(Seagate 250 GB, generation 10) were just as fast as the RAID, and still
faster than the previous PATA hard drive (WD Caviar 120GB dated 11/2005 run
off an Acard 6280M, NOT the egregiously slow motherboard). I would recommend
upgrading your hard disk to SATA, even with the cost of a new controller
card factored in. 

BTW, I used Quickbench for disk testing.

On Thu, 05 Oct 2006 11:25:08 -0500, "Edward O'Neal" <eoneal at mac.com>wrote:

> I'm interested in the G4 upgrade chip on your Blue&White.  I also have a
> Blue&White that I'm not using right now.  I'd like to hear about your
> experience with your upgrade.  Brand?  Where'd you buy it?  Satisfied with
> performance?  Issues? I'd love to use my old machine but sure would like to
> get a little more performance out of it and upgrade to 10.4.8.