Speeding up my sawtooth

**Carlo** · July 21st, 2002, 07:30 AM

Hi all.

I was wondering your opinions on the area of desktop speed, specifically moving windows around and navigating around aqua. My mac is a little sluggish when moving between screens and resizing and I put it down to the speed of the system. (g4 450)

But I was playing with a similar machine (well speed anyway) being a g4 powerbook with similar mhz.. and its considerably faster.

so my question is

Would me changing the video card help, my mac has the stocko ATI Rage that they put into the sawtooths.

If so then what can I get that will go into my mac. I dont play games so im not to fussed.

My System specs
g4 450 (sawtooth model)
640Meg Ram
20gig ultra ata hdd
osx 10.1.5
Ati Rage 128 Pro (AGP)

**dslmatt** · July 21st, 2002, 08:08 AM

I have the same problem with my G4/400 mac with much the same specs. I want to use OS X as my main OS but have to keep switching back to OS 9 due to the speed of X. I bought 256mb of RAM to try to improve the situation but it made no difference. What causes the sluggish performance? Video card, processor speed, hard drive or is it just down to the OS? I dread to think what OS X would run like on a G3!! Is speed going to be improved in Jaguar or is it going to put even more demands on the system???

My specs are:

G4/400 AGP
Rage Pro Card
40/20 gb hard drives
512MB Ram

**Ifrit** · July 21st, 2002, 09:05 AM

I have a blue clamshell ibook (G3 300 + 160MB RAM) and OSX version 10.1.5 is performing fine. The time to boot the machine is a bit long but I got used to it. It is my first mac and I am happy with it, the only thing which I don't like is the low 800x600 resolution and the small 3 GB HD. Thats the the reason I'll switch to an emac.
Resizing Windows is no problem even if ~7 of the resource demanding apps (Photoshop etc) are runnin' with million of colors (more on on a 800x600 res and the screen gets really crowded.) I am really suprised how OSX performs on a machine wich is at the bottom of the system requirement... Now with the latest OSX upgrade the Quicktime is HW accelerated so I can view movies in fullscreen with my ibook without slowdown.

**ksv** · July 21st, 2002, 06:03 PM

OS X runs perfectly on my G4/400 which is overclocked to 500 MHz. It only has a cheap ATI Rage 128 Pro card, but 576 MB of RAM, which really speeds the system up.

You could try to go to the Terminal and type

sudo update_prebinding -root /

and press enter. Then enter your admin password and press enter. It takes about 5-20 minutes.
That should speed things up

**Carlo** · July 21st, 2002, 08:00 PM

Your machine is similar to mine..

I am planning to get a geforce 4 card for my machine and see if that improve it. Anohter thought is that it might be worth updating the drivers of the rage card.

Originally posted by dslmatt
I have the same problem with my G4/400 mac with much the same specs. I want to use OS X as my main OS but have to keep switching back to OS 9 due to the speed of X. I bought 256mb of RAM to try to improve the situation but it made no difference. What causes the sluggish performance? Video card, processor speed, hard drive or is it just down to the OS? I dread to think what OS X would run like on a G3!! Is speed going to be improved in Jaguar or is it going to put even more demands on the system???

My specs are:

G4/400 AGP
Rage Pro Card
40/20 gb hard drives
512MB Ram

**thedbp** · July 22nd, 2002, 02:55 PM

I have a B&W G3 that I upgraded to a G4 450. I added a Radeon 7000 PCI graphics card and 896 MB of RAM.

OS X is sluggish, there's no denying it. Then again, there are certain instances when I'm playing on my friends dual-GHz G4, and to be honest, while it is smoother to a point, the operations still seem like they lag a little.

I can honestly say getting a new graphics card won't help 10.1.5 for you. Perhaps Jaguar, but not the current release of OS X. And Jaguar will run smoother on ALL machines, even G3's, beause from what I've seen of the UI, it seems as though they remade all the widgets, buttons, tabs, etc to be less complex, which will reduce the size of the graphics that need to be manipulated to give you your nice OS X experience. At least that's what I'm hoping for.

**dslmatt** · July 22nd, 2002, 03:36 PM

I hope so. I did find that Apple done this with Mac OS 7 through to 9. Starting out on Mac OS 7 I found it a similar experience to X (speed wise!) and Apple gradually improved the OS making it faster and more stable.

Bottom line is, if Apple want us to embrace their new OS they need to make it more than a shiny, pretty system. I personally want it to be fast and practical. I did'nt buy a G4 to have it run like my old performa 5400!

That's why I am still using OS9...

**thedbp** · July 23rd, 2002, 12:13 AM

I run a Quadra 660 a/v with 52MB of RAM (that's 25MHz 68040 folks!) at work with OS 8.1. It has about the same performance as my G4 450 with 896 MB of RAM with 10.1.5. Granted, I can't DO most of the stuff I can do with my G4 on that Quadra (although it does have killer video capabilities in its own right), but for day to day stuff, word, internet, etc., its about the same.

scary.