Improve iMac800/LCD performance

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Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I have a friend who asked me about this and I wanted to help him a bit more so I thought I woudl post here.



This guy could end up being a hard-core switcher and platform defender, but for now he is just a PC user that happens to also own a Mac.



He does a lot of multimedia development and bought an iMac 17 with Superdrive and 800 mhz G4. He has complained a bit about performance issues. It has 768 megs of RAM, a 60 gig (7200 rpm) HD.



I asked him about it and it turns out he likes the machine more and more and so he has started to do more and more with it. It was supposed to test screensavers, Director and Flash animations and things of that nature. Now he is asking me how to get it to encode DV to Quicktime faster and things of that nature. He also complains that Flash MX and some of the Macromedia products are slow on it.



He complained about the encoding performance compared to his PC and SGI box. He was comparing the PC and Mac using Premiere to encode. I suggested Cleaner v.6 but I would really like to see if there is someway to help him squeeze some more performance out of his Mac.



He likes the Mac quite a bit and understands it is a prosumer model that he has started to outgrow. When I suggested a duel tower might be a better route, he was receptive to either selling his current iMac or giving it to his teenage son who has been clamoring for it.



However I would really like to find some solutions that might improve the value proposition of the iMac for him for a bit. It might make him commit even more money and resources to the next Mac he buys.



So the issues again are Macromedia program performance, (Director specifically I believe) and video encoding on a G4@800 mhz with no backside cache.



Nick

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 2
    costiquecostique Posts: 1,084member
    I'd check the hard drive. If it's 5400 RPM, he should install a 7200 one. This makes big difference if he is processing huge files. As for software tweaks, he might slightly renice Flash (or other apps he is using), quit Apache and other hungry apps. I am almost sure this won't give him as impressive results as a faster HD. Some geeks say that reformatting the HD without OS 9 drivers can help too, but I never tried it.

    I would not recommend voiding the license, but I heard there is a way to actually overclock the CPU. It involves removing resistors and may just kill the machine. I am not giving you any URLs, because \ I am not helping anybody commit a suicide.
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  • Reply 2 of 2
    ast3r3xast3r3x Posts: 5,012member
    i would say the terminal renice command might eek another percentage or two out of the usage, i am not sure what people are doing that complain about speed though, because i had no problems (well not bad problems) with speed when i used a 400MHz G3 system with 384MB RAM. I'd say that he should get a dual system because 800MHz G4 to encode video isn't as nice as dual 1.42 Gig



    he can try and run stuff in 9...yuck...but it would run faster
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