[G4] Strange G4 issue solved

[Gregory Cortelyou]

I have an antique G4 350 AGP that I am in love with. It has served me 
well for several years and hope it continues to for several more. About 
10 days ago I installed the most recent security updates over 10.3.6 
and immediately noticed things had slowed down considerably. Especially 
web browsing in Safari. I repaired permissions as always. A restart 
helped but things were not as before. Of course I found a whole bunch 
of people on the Apple forum with the usual all sorts of horrible 
problems but not anything like mine. Things seemed better for a while, 
then over the weekend it got really bad. Web pages would take forever 
to load (I have a speedy Verizon DSL) and some of the games I have were 
impossible. Mail was acting strange. I thought I had a virus. But no. 
So I checked in Console and saw LOTS of problems with ATI software not 
responding properly. I have a Radeon 8500 Mac edition which I installed 
about 2 years ago and never had any problems. I downloaded their latest 
update patch last night, restarted and all was back to even better than 
normal. Everything is faster than ever (knocking on wood) and I am 
pretty happy. So, why would this happen? What would I have done if I 
didn't know enough to look in console and known that I had that card, 
etc? Most people I know don't know anything about that stuff. The 
update to the ATI software was put out in early November, well before 
the Apple security update that apparently caused problems with my 
video. And it can be installed on any system above 10.2.8. Has anybody 
else had any experience like this? I am grateful for the easy fix. But 
I wonder why it happened.
Greg C.