habilis
Ministry of Re-Education
About a month ago I bought a new Power Mac G4 Dual 1ghz, and ever since that fateful purchase I have been INCREDIBLY dissatisfied with every aspect of this machine. First I should say that I use a G4 450MHz at work for 8+ hours a day and am quite familiar with the Macintosh system, have been using for the last 5 years along with windows. What Apple doen't tell you is that Jaguar is actually a Turtle. At first I was dismayed with how slow folder navigation was and the fact that the finder crashed about once every hour. The other thing that bugged me was the disgustingly long page times and general lock-ups that plagued the simplest of tasks and navigation. In particular was my folders full of digital photography images - about 2-300 jpegs per folder ranging in file size from about .5 to 1.3MB, opening that folder in the finder window would bring the OS to a TOTAL halt for about 30-40 seconds. In Windows ME with FULL PREVIEWS on that same folder took less than 5 seconds and didn't lock up the system while it paged. I thought that it must be a lack of RAM, so I upgraded to a full Gig of Apple-spec RAM only to be disappointed again when it hardly made a hair of difference- now it took 28 seconds insted of 30. I called Apple and they said they you CAN'T turn off Virtual Memory!?!?! I looked at the Process viewer and found that "Jaguar" was using 90% Virtual and only 10% Physical RAM for almost all apps - That's Pathetic. What we have here is a dumbing down of the OS as well as a slowing down of all that's associated with it. Sure the thing runs like a speed demon when I run in Classic but that's not why I bought the machine. I think we need to be asking ourselves more fundemental questions about OS's - for example, shouldn't a newer "More Improved" OS, and especially one named for the FASTEST LAND MAMMAL ON EARTH be Faster??? and maybe a little more stable??? The truth is my G4 450MHz at work is easily more stable and gets the job done just as well as this waste of money I'm stuck with now. It has nothing to do with a Hardware Failure. I ran all the memory and hardware tests and then went to Compucenter just to try out the same one there to make sure - same B.S. So my hat's off to Apple for pulling the wool over so many people's eyes. And it's a crying shame that all these poor devout Mac people out there(that used to be me) are in a total state of denial about how much Apple now sucks. Apple took every that was good about Macs out of OSX and put in everything that was bad about Windows - THANKS. We need to face this problem head on, accept that Apple's Glory Days are over, and go get yourself a copy of XP. By the way, If anyone knows how to turn off Virtual Memory without the aid of a Haxie, I'd like to know how to do that before I put this thing up on eBay.