Font smoothing and speeding up processes

[terran74]

I have been playing with a Prefernce pane called "TinkerTools" and an application called renicer to see if I can speed up Application performance.

Font Smoothing:

With Tinkertools, I've disabled the Font Smoothing in CoreGraphics.

I have seen an increase of performance that is quite dramatic in Virtual PC, Java applications/applets, and even web browsing. Applications with no fonts live the game Civilization 3 seem to have been slowed down when the font smoothing was turned. These apps perform better now that I have turned it off. I was wondering if Apple was aware of this.

I hope you guys will allow us to disable the font smoothing temporarily to do things that may not need the font smoothing feature like we were able to in MacOS 9 under the Appearance Control Panel. For things like playing games or working in iPhoto this would be nice. When we are ready for the font smothing for stuff like Indesign and browsing the web, we can turn it back on.

Process Priorities:

"Renicer", using the command 'renice' under the terminal or any of the third party apps that help you renice processes has resulted in huge speed gains.

I used "Renicer" because it lets you set the priority of the front most application by giving it highest priority and then giving it a normal priority when you switch to another application. This is similar to how things were in MacOS 9 under the cooperative multitasking environment.

This is an ok solution but I would like an easier way to just tell the OS to put stuff like iToolsHelper and AOL instant messenger, or the Palm Conduit helper at a lower priority so that I don't bog down my CPU with those applications. I've noticed that individually some of these background apps don't make a huge dent in the cpu, but have enough of them running in the background and you will see a difference. Unfortunately I have alot of helper apps running for stuff like that and my mouse. I see myself adding more overtime as we move to MacOS 10.

Anyway, that's all. Im going back to play Civ 3. Since quartz font smoothing is turned off at the moment, this game flies.