[X Newbies] Where's the cube?

[Michael Winter]

On Apr 13, 2004, at 5:10 PM, Dale Critchley wrote:

> With fast user switching on my eMac 1 GHz, when I switch users, I 
> don't get
> the rotating cube effect. It just fades to blue, then into the new 
> user. How
> do I get the cube?

Here are a few factors that seem to determine wether or not you see the 
effect:

1) You need to be capable of running Quartz Extreme (not a problem for 
your machine IIRC).

2) You need sufficient RAM -how much depends on how much stuff you have 
going on.

3) If the user you are switching to is not already logged in, you won't 
see the cube effect.

4) Sometimes if the computer is too busy, it just won't show the effect 
-its eye candy the OS knows can be dropped for more important things. 
Note from #2 above, not having enough RAM means lots of VM swapping 
which means too busy. The tradeoff seems to be that Apple has decided 
users would prefer user switching to happen as fast as possible, that 
means not letting the cube effect slow down the process.

One other observation, if you put 2 & 4 together the result is Classic 
will often kill the effect on some machines (dual processor machines 
seem to handle this much better).

-Mike