Dragging problem

[SnowWhite]

On Monday, April 14, 2003, at 01:32  PM, Power Macintosh G4 List wrote:

>
>> The problem I am having is that through out the day my mac starts to
>> drag or delay and especially if I am on line. It seems to be fine in 
>> the
>> morning when I start my day and by the end of the drags badly. What I
>> mean by drag is for example, I type and sentence and the letters show 
>> up
>> 2 or 3 minutes later.
>
> I have the same problem on a Sawtooth 400.  Personally, I think OS 9 
> sucks, and
> my theory is when I install 8.6 on it, the problem will vanish.  
> However, I am
> VERY new to the G4 crowd, so if anyone has any facts (rather than 
> opinions) I
> would be indebted.
>
> -Lavode


Lavode and the original poster;

OS 9 is much more capably than OS 8 but you do what you think best. If 
you are doing graphic design (in OS 9 or lower) you should reboot every 
4 hours or so. The programs you are using are memory hungry and can 
easily fill the heap and overflow the stack causing a fatal error. 
Think of your memory as a glass and as you open programs add water. 
Then if you close a program with memory at the bottom of the glass the 
memory is theoretically open but the memories of all the programs above 
it block it away. Now open any program (even the same one as before)  
and it will take memory from the top thus filling the glass futher. 
Eventually all your programs begin to crawl for want of memory and if 
it fills right past the top the overflow causes a system crash.

Poorly written programs are real culprites of this and also very large 
memory using programs can cause this problem. A reboot will solve it. 
If it does not then use Nortons and DiskWarrior to fix it and optimize 
the disks.

OSX is different with dynamic memory alocation - just feed it lots of 
ram and let it do its thing. OSX has given me no memory problems with 
this G4 running for months at a time. Classic does have memory problems 
such as in OS 9.

jj