Having slow-down problems again
I upgraded my G4 800MHz tower to Tiger which is great, but I have problems that I didn't have with Panther. The computer slowed down to a snails pace, and I re-installed Tiger (thanks Lundy) solving the problem for a while. Other suggestions by Marvin helped, too.
However a slow down has reoccurred several times. I have temporarily resolved the problem each time by using activity monitor (thanks again, Lundy) and quitting processes using large amounts of memory. Those apps are usually browsers (Safari and FF) and Mac Mail. After restarting the browsers, the memory usage is much less than before but eventually climbs.
My questions are:
Is Tiger too much for my computer and should I return to Panther? (I'd rather not have to do that.)
Why are browsers using so much memory?
Is there another way to resolve the problem?
Should I just forget about an absolute fix and be grateful that my temporary fix works.
Choose one or none of the above.
Thanks.
However a slow down has reoccurred several times. I have temporarily resolved the problem each time by using activity monitor (thanks again, Lundy) and quitting processes using large amounts of memory. Those apps are usually browsers (Safari and FF) and Mac Mail. After restarting the browsers, the memory usage is much less than before but eventually climbs.
My questions are:
Is Tiger too much for my computer and should I return to Panther? (I'd rather not have to do that.)
Why are browsers using so much memory?
Is there another way to resolve the problem?
Should I just forget about an absolute fix and be grateful that my temporary fix works.
Choose one or none of the above.
Thanks.
Comments
Don't use FF 2 as the memory issues are well documented all over the web. Use FF 3 if you like FF better than Safari.
Otherwise, Activity Monitor is good for killing processes but there is no Fix All for your slowness.
how much memory do you have now? Either way I'd add more if you're running into memory issues
Don't use FF 2 as the memory issues are well documented all over the web. Use FF 3 if you like FF better than Safari.
Otherwise, Activity Monitor is good for killing processes but there is no Fix All for your slowness.
I have 1GB of memory out of a maximum of 1.5GB. I've been using FF3; however, I think I'll stick to Safari. FF3 still uses a lot of memory even when it's running, but I'm not using it. Safari seems to use 1/3 the memory that FF3 uses under similar conditions.
I've also started experimenting with Opera. In any case, I'll make sure that I don't have more than one browser running at one time.
Thanks
I would wait until the new one arrives though (hopefully next month) with Penryn + new graphics chipset + faster Ram + hopefully bigger hard drives.
There's very little you can do to your current machine that would result in a 600% speedup. You won't have to pay for Leopard either and you will get the benefits of Snow Leopard, which your current machine won't.
If you can't afford a new one, here's one for around $350:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Mac-Mini-with-wi...QQcmdZViewItem
It looks like it was posted just over an hour ago from this post so you might want to be quick as that seems like a good deal to me.
It says single core but they mistook Core Duo to mean one CPU vs Core 2 Duo when it's actually just a lower revision. It's still dual 1.83GHz. The hard drive is a bit small but you can get cheap external firewire drives or upgrade it to an internal 7200rpm 2.5" drive - I wouldn't recommend you do the latter yourself though.
Why are browsers using so much memory?
They leak memory, especially on sites with Flash or videos and dynamic pages. Dynamic pages allocate objects on the fly but sometimes don't free them up again. Generally I find that Safari is much less resource intensive than Firefox - Firefox gets bogged down quite a lot and as you say, it uses CPU in the background.
I would wait until the new one arrives though (hopefully next month) with Penryn + new graphics chipset + faster Ram + hopefully bigger hard drives.
Thanks Marvin. I intend to buy a new Mini. I thought there would be an upgrade at WWDC. Hopefully, there will be a new one by the time school starts. In the meantime, I'm trying to make the best of it with this old G4. I'm going to feel sad when it has to go. It was my first Mac and opened my eyes to the Apple mystique. I was going to put it out to pasture, but I think I'll keep it for the nostalgic factor. I still have my first DOS based PC- 8 MHz, two 5 1/4" floppies, etc. The first desktop PC I used didn't even have a HDD. The second one had a 20 MB RLL hard drive, but the RLL (can't remember what that means) bumped it up 50% to 30MB. Boy, that was cool. I think it had 64 megs of memory (can that be right?), We've come a long way.
Thanks for directing me to the Mini on eBay, but money is not the problem. I could afford a Mac Pro with all the bells and whistles; however, I refuse to do so. I'm just irritated with Apple for not giving us an xMac.