OS X Problems... still

[Arden]

It's really not fair to demand that someone upgrade their system. You can only suggest it, you can't expect someone to do it just because you think they should. Nobody has the same financial situation as anyone else; some people can afford 4 or 5 new Macs at the same time, and some are lucky they got a used computer.

I understand your situation, fishbone. You want more speed & power, but you can't afford to pour much money into it. If you can afford hardware upgrades, buy a new machine. If you can't afford that, go for a processor upgrade to at least an 800 Mhz G4. If you can't even get that, try to max out your RAM and get a superfast, large hard drive.

If you don't want to mess with your gear, try to upgrade everything you can. Reinstall the system if it's not too much of an issue so you can get your drag & drop back. Go online and look for Mac-related sites, both fixer-upper types like www.xlr8yourmac.com or www.macfixit.com, forums like this one, or more magazine-style sites like actual magazines, www.macaddict.com and www.macworld.com. Scour all these sites for issues related to your various problems. There are lots of shortcuts you can take to improve your speed just a little, many Terminal-accessible. You can turn on window buffering or change the default format for your screenshots, and probably disable some of the Aqua slowdown features.

I'm sorry you're in this situation, but there's really not a whole lot you can do to improve performance without spending money. It's not right, it's not fair, but that's how the world is.

What do you actually do? Do you work for an advertiser, or a magazine? Can you show us some of the Photoshop work you do that pays your bills and feeds your family?

[bing]

It si possible to take screen dumps as JPEGS - theres a setting somewhere.

Is that what you mean by snapshots?

[dlloyd]

Wow, that's interesting! Could you tell us where?

[theyallfalll]

How do you turn off stuff that's eating up cpu, but its not an app or anything. I attached a screenshot of my process viewer. HP Scanjet Manager eats up a lot of cpu and I am not even using it. I hardly ever use my scanner and i never have the software running.

I'm on a Dual 1ghz G4 with 768 of ram and every afternoon after lunch i have to restart my computer because everything goes real slow. and when i turn the volume up it will go all the way up or down with just one click.

I hope this makes sense, I'm frustrated and have a lot of work to do.

thanks