[Ti] How do I get more speed from my Ti 400?

[Trevor J. Hutley]

At 11:50 -0500 9-2-2003, William Benton wrote:
>My Ti 400, 40GB IBM GNX Drive, 384 MB RAM, OS 10.2.3 runs like a 
>snail. Would more RAM help? I am aware that the vid requirements are 
>not met by this machine but Jag still runs better than any other 
>OSX. Finder speed is my problem.

Willy - my Ti-500/IBM 40 Gb GNX 5400 rpm drive/512 Mb RAM/OS 10.2.3 
runs pretty well, in terms of Finder speed.  (Of course, it could 
always be faster, and I look for every increment of speed).

I have the 5400 drive.
I will increase my RAM (soon) to 768.
I often run Repair Permissions.
I run System Optimizer X 3.1.4 every few weeks.
I also re-boot in Classic every few weeks and run Disk Warrior 
(rebuild directories, de-fragment disks).

That is my regular "maintenance schedule"!

I think that if I was you, and none of the above helped, that I would 
make a complete back-up, erase the hard drive totally, re-install the 
OS, restore everything from the backup.  Not forgetting to keep the 
backup catalogue and backup software somewhere, that is somewhere 
apart from in the backup.

I have two ways that I measure "speed" on my Ti-500.

(1) Start-up time: from when the Apple first appears on the grey 
screen to when the first icons in my Dock start jumping ( I have some 
that launch at start-up, eg Folding at Home).

When I measure this time - with my stop-watch - it is below 1 min 30 
sec; and in the best case gets as low as 1 min 4 sec.

(2) I use AltiVec Fractal Carbon 1.1.2 (under Classic) to measure 
(one aspect of) my Ti-500 speed.
This gives me (I just ran it) 1.584 Gigaflops.   It was breaking the 
1 Gigaflop barrier that earned the Ti-500 as a supercomputer-to-go 
status.
based on this metric, I believe that th latest Powerbooks are 5X as 
fast as mine.

HTH

regards,  Trevor