help with decreasing powerbook performance
hello,
i have a 1.25 powerbook g4 with 512mb running 10.4.1. i need some help trouble shooting overall slow performace. i've just noticed this recently and have not installed any new programs. i have 50 gig available on the hard drive. i do a lot of video editing so sometimes i have a lot on the desktop but i just deleted it all.
iPhoto is super slow and if i have 4 or 5 other programs running it takes about 5 min to load. there is also a lag just clicking on things. dashboard and finder are both slower than before. can someone help me trouble shoot? my powerbook is less than 2 yrs old.
thanks.
i have a 1.25 powerbook g4 with 512mb running 10.4.1. i need some help trouble shooting overall slow performace. i've just noticed this recently and have not installed any new programs. i have 50 gig available on the hard drive. i do a lot of video editing so sometimes i have a lot on the desktop but i just deleted it all.
iPhoto is super slow and if i have 4 or 5 other programs running it takes about 5 min to load. there is also a lag just clicking on things. dashboard and finder are both slower than before. can someone help me trouble shoot? my powerbook is less than 2 yrs old.
thanks.
Comments
OSX running slow?
Dang, I was just about to switch!
Originally posted by plasma
anyone?
How about your Dashboard? Do you have a lot of widgets running in the background? I had about 10 widgets on and I noticed that my battery life was around 2 hours max. I deleted all my widgets and now my battery life is 3.5 hours (I use a 15" PB 1.67 with Tiger and 2 GB RAM). I realized that I don't need the widgets that much; at least not enough to lose over an hour of battery life!
cheers
For me, I repair permissions and restart and all is well.
You may also consider booting from your OS X cd and use disk utility to repair your disk.
rick: how do i repair permissions?
Originally posted by plasma
how do i repair permissions?
Run Disk Utility (From the Finder, shift command U, then double click Disk Utility)
Select your hard drive from the left pane.
Click "Repair Disk Permissions" button towards the middle bottom of the window.
just some ideas good luck
pb is now running much better after running check disk and repair disk permissions. i may do a clean install of 10.4.2 when it comes out or as soon as i figure out how to back up all my data.
on my 256mb iBook g4 4200 drive, it was flat out 99% memory used even with nothing much loaded. not good.
got a 512mb stick
Apacer brand, cheap, and it is working very well so far. lifetime warranty. RAM is a very worthwhile investment...
your hard disk is 5400rpm i think, so 1gb or more ram and you're sitting sweet.
also, to back up, best thing is a straight clone (without your raw/work video files) using Super Duper!
great program, works well on Tiger IMHO
you can get a 3.5" fw400 or fw800 IDE-firewire bridge, drop in a fat 200gb 7200rpm 3.5" drive, and use that as your backup thingy. with the right research, cheaper, better, more scalable than a Lacie external drive setup thingy for example. some nice 200gb or so 7200rpm 8mb cache 3.5" drives out there, fw800 to ultra/ata133 bridge, and would be some very nice stuff for your working video files or your backing up(cloning) of your system disk using super duper ~ smart partitioning the external drive is the key here
phew. it came out all at once, stream of consciousness. good luck brotha, hopefully it will make sense or we've been able to point you in the right direcshiion
.......
running 4 widgets, safari, and activity monitor and here is what it shows: Free 346MB, VM size 3.71GB, Used 166.9
running all above plus iPhoto and iCal it shows: Free 5MB, VM 4.48BG, Used 505MB
Originally posted by chris v
If you're using up all your RAM, and the OS is paging out to virtual memory, that'll really cause a slowdown, especially with a 4200 rpm drive. Toss another 512 MB or 1 GB RAM stick in there, if you can afford to.
Originally posted by plasma
do i verify this in activity monitor?
running 4 widgets, safari, and activity monitor and here is what it shows: Free 346MB, VM size 3.71GB, Used 166.9
running all above plus iPhoto and iCal it shows: Free 5MB, VM 4.48BG, Used 505MB
yup more memory (a 512mb or 1gb stick) and a fresh install of 10.4.2 or so will sweeten things IMHO
Originally posted by plasma
do i verify this in activity monitor?
running 4 widgets, safari, and activity monitor and here is what it shows: Free 346MB, VM size 3.71GB, Used 166.9
running all above plus iPhoto and iCal it shows: Free 5MB, VM 4.48BG, Used 505MB
It's not important that OS X is using 505 out of 512 MB - that's what it is designed to do. The Mach philosophy is - you paid for it, you might as well use it.
What IS important is the number of pageouts - on the System Memory tab of the Activity Monitor. Those shouldn't be huge or rapidly increasing.
what does this mean?
Originally posted by lundy
It's not important that OS X is using 505 out of 512 MB - that's what it is designed to do. The Mach philosophy is - you paid for it, you might as well use it.
What IS important is the number of pageouts - on the System Memory tab of the Activity Monitor. Those shouldn't be huge or rapidly increasing.
Originally posted by plasma
page in/outs: 98490/44717
what does this mean?
Pageouts 44717 - not too bad, but it means that there are times (maybe only a few seconds) that the system had to move some contents of RAM to disk to make room for something else. When that happens, you feel a slowdown while the swap happens.
This could be something as trivial as you opened ONE big file ONCE in PhotoShop, or it could be that the apps that you normally run all the time are requiring just a bit more memory than you have, resulting in the occasional swap of a few KB to disk.
To learn more, restart and watch the pageouts as you work. If they steadily climb as the hours go by, you could stand a little more memory.