Give me a BREAK

Originally posted by treetopflyer
OS X is ridiculous! I read all of this spin saying how it was going to be the world's most advanced os, and decided to buy it.. as it turns out, running on my graphite iMac with 256 MB Ram, it is the world's slowest os. When I use instant messenger, I can type faster than the computer can think.. when I resize windows, it takes a few years for it to work. and that stupid dock is so big and clumsy.. I wish apple could have made an OS that was faster and better rather than prettier. and I call up apple and they say..."uhhh.. you can't uninstall it"
Click to expand...


Obviously everyone is experiencing the same thing.. It is slow around the edges no mater what you tweek. Don't use a background image, its a tad faster. But I'm frustrated to. you can modify the dock and windows nicely, BUT WE CAN'T TURN OFF REALTIME WINDOW DRAG, and GRAPHIC GROUP DRAGGING?!?! That was indeed a ridiculous move. I've noticed some applications (AIM for OSX) has gone back to 'rubberband' :)

For a lot of us, OSX is not finished.. we are all using OS 9.1 to do our work...

As a designer, OSX is useless until Wacom and Adobe get it together. Still, it's a neat toy.

For those expecting OSX to save their lives.. its a big put down when they discover not really ready for primetime!

It may be another year before we are all happy. In the mean time it's back to OS 9.1 and I'm sick of it. Day after day I must see my so called fast G4 come to a slow crawl when I insert a disc and it accesses it every time I want to scratch my ass.

max.
 
I forgot to say: You can adjust the type speed under the Keyboard app. You can modify the doc until it's just not there... I like to make it stand still, make the icons smaller, and use Comand-option-D to hide and display the dock. I love it. All these options, but why oh why can't I turn off the realtime window resizing and slow grouping just amazes me. I mean, come on, apple should be all about these kinds of options! How else am I going to think different. :)
 
I am running OS X on my G4 400 AGP with 640 MB of ram. I installed the dev tools cd my 3rd day and noticed a bigtime speed improvement in application startup and processing. It also sped up Classic in OS X and also sped up startup form my OS 9.1 partition. A couple of days ago I installed update 4L7 and now the OS is rock solid. No panic, speed has improved slightly. But, the GUI is still slow. Moving and resizing windows is the only fault I have with the OS itself.

It is only a matter of time before all the old apps I used in OS 9 will be out for X. I believe by the fall, all will be well with OS X and I can delete my OS 9.1 partition.

 
OS X runs quite fast on my system. Resizing windows is a bit slow; however, I am running a program in the terminal that likes to take 150%-190% of the processing power (dual % over 100 means it is using both processors). Even with the processors being tapped out the system is extremely responsive and about twice as fast as OS 9.1.
 
the issue about osx running faster after the installation of the developer cd is confirmed by apple. as well as the RELEASE OF THE 10.1 UPDATE this week! (by apple staff)
 
Okay, so where in the HELL did Apple actually say this?

And, shouldn't it be the release of 10.0.1 this week? You said 10.1, which as far as I knew wasn't supposed to be out until MWNY...

I think maybe you're pulling our leg...
 
I haven't had any speed problems but I did take the suggestion on the defrag. Used Disk Warrior and sure enough the system seemed a bit faster, but it's hard to use a stop watch on something thats fast already.

powerbook bronze k
333mhz
128megs
10 gig hd
 
After multiple installs on a G4 2X500 256meg, a blue G3 with 128 meg, and an original maxed out iBook. I have determined the following to be VERY true.
<br>
OSX runs like a pig if you upgrade from 9.0.4 to 9.1 and then install OS X.
<br>
OSX runs like a pig if you have an old (but clean) 9.1 install to which you add OS X.
<br>
OSX runs like a bat out of hell when you wipe the disk, install 9.1 and then install OS X.
<P>
Of my 3 original installs, the last one, on the 300 mhz iBook, outperformed both the G3 and the G4 -- simply because of the overall disk performance and fragmentation issues. When I re-installed the G3 and G4 formatting the disks first, they ran as I expected -- fast.
<P>
I did not try rebuilding the HFS+ catalog with DiskWarrior, which I suspect would have done a lot to help, but not solve the problem. OS X is a real virtual memory operating system, and because of the way in which the "swap disk" is created and installed, disk fragmentation will play a huge part in performance.
 
I agree that the problems expressed in speed here are due to contiguous free drive space. I have long lived by the rule of thumb that half full is full. If your hard drive is more than half full, you need another hard drive.
Now with VM swap chunks growing dynamically, memery footprints ebing huge, and VM space often exceeding 1 G on a lightly loaded system, I am going to promote this rule of thumb to everyone I can.
If your HD is more than 50% full, buy another. Fragmentation kills, and even with 512 M of Ram on this system VM speed is an issue.
 
I know that OSX is not yet so finished as it can be. But after having laid down two weeks on tweaking and configuring the OS it runs very well... I start the modem dialup, and after that I click up MSIE, OmniWeb, Carracho, Mail, iTunes and CPU monitor. All of them have opened just in time for the connect to internet to finish. I am in the process of porting some applications to OSX, so I use CodeWarrior 6. Works great. iTunes is fast (6-8x compression) and the whole system runs smoothly. I have yet to test to reformat a disk before installing OSX but that will have to wait sometime. And for all you moving windows - I don't get it! Even with the Public Beta I could move windows w/o problem. The major problem is resizing windows! And since I don't have a signature I'll just have to type in my system config:

G4/500 MHz
512 MB RAM
1x 23GB hd (System Disk)
1x 40GB hd (Play around disk)
Lots of USB peripherals (Printer, Hub, Serial Adapter, Kensington Mouse)
DVD-RAM
Zip drive
 
FYI The Filer: You can put your config in as your signature!

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I agree! I have very little problems in terms of speed. Window resizing is a little behind my cursor (it's certainly a small price to pay for everything else we get with OS X), but window moving is seemless and fast.

Since 10.0.1, even the genie effect is fast and smooth!!! Call me crazy, but I actually switched back to 'genie' from 'scale'.

I've discovered that I no longer miss spring-loaded folders becasue I can drag and drop files directly on toolbar icons or Docked folders to copy and move, which is FASTER and EASIER than spring loaded folders. If you don't like the toolbar icons, use the text.

After just 2-1/2 weeks of OS X I am hooked on it's feature-set. Even in it's early stages, I am finding that using OS X as it was meant to be used (read: stop pretending its OS 9>), without the desktop, with the Dock, without multiple windows, with Toolbars,...etc, is much easier, more effecient, and more FUN!

I for one, am looking forward to the many improvements that will only make it better!
 
Alright, this will be my last bitching session about OSX performance..

Is it just me, or does the fact that when you download something to the desktop (eeek, there's that word again), like from a browser, the icon doesn't even show (in most cases) until I actually touch the desktop? I'm sorry, but that's pretty retarded.

I have noticed that OS9 does the same thing, but not as bad as X.

max.
 
Maxebb - this is not the fault of OS X, but of the (stupid) Internet Explorer 5.1 preview release.

I highly reccomend using OmniWeb. It is the best browser out there for any platform. The only problem with it is lack of plug-ins, etc., but the more that we support them, the more this browser will become a standard to be contended with.

Contrary to popular belief, the browser war is NOT over. Join the struggle, download OmniWeb at www.omnigroup.com

 
Has anyone had this problem:

When you download a jpeg or gif,...etc from OmniWeb, you get a generic JPEG or GIF icon? But when you download the same things from IE, you get a high quality (128x128, i think) preview icon?
 
I am new to the mac, so bear with me. I recently purchased a G4 733 and have been running some comparisons between it running OS X, OS 9.1 and a dual 1 ghz PC running Win 2k. The testing I have been doing is with Photoshop Elements, which is both a Mac and Windows app. I am not using a stop watch or anything, instead, I have both the PC and Mac setup side by side and click on filters simultaneously, and then monitor which machine finished the effect first. Comparing OS 9.1 against the dual 1 ghz proves to be disappointing for the Mac. The Wintel machine beats it in every filter, usually by several seconds, some as much as 10 plus seconds. What really struck me though was the comparison between OS X and the PC. Running the same filters on the same image in "classic" mode under OS X showed the Mac beating the dual PC in most of the filters. Only a few did the dual 1ghz beat the mac OS X machine. What would the results be with a native version of the program? I personally can't wait to see.

BRING ON THE OSX APPS!!!!
 
It seems to me that people with fast processors (400 Mhz G4 or better) are quite happy with OS X performance. It is only those of us with the slower G3s that are feeling hammered. I just wish I could disable transparency in the menus and window bars, and anti-aliasing of system text. It is pretty, but not worth it to me.

I have a problem with the idea that a processor as fast as a G3 should have to labor to do basic UI functions. Perhaps this is a function of Apple being a hardware company - they would rather motivate people to run out and buy new boxes than work to make performance reasonable on older machines. But they run the risk, ISTM that people will conclude that OS X just does not perform, and is not worth buying or supporting.
 
I agree that it's a pain to watch OS X run slow on a G3 when it rips on a G4, but this seems to be a driver support issue. I'm happy it runs reliably, and sleeps and wakes up consistently, and never complain about RAM on my powerbook. I think Apple has neglected a lot of older video cards and simply isn't accelerating all of the video that they could if they were trying to be compatible. Personally, I'm OK with the performance I get, although I do think I'm gonna get more RAM.

I'd rather the limited number of engineers on OS X work on other things, like scsi support for my big box so that I can scan and burn again. There are more critical things missing, I can deal with slow but functional for the time being. I do hope that they try to speed things up a little. Although I'm not sure about being able to turn off a bunch of features. UI consistency is important, and keeping options down to a reasonable number makes OS programming easier.
 
On my iMac DV+, OS X moves along smooth and fast. I do notice a bit of lag when I click on a menu, but not much. What gets me is that I surf faster with Netscape in classic than I do with OmniWeb or IE. When I updated to 10.0.1 and then again (printer drivers of some sort?), I noticed a _HUGE_ speed increase.

But my Kingston USB cam and my PNY Flash card reader still does not work :< (but in classic, I can access the card reader :/).




-Me

iMac DV+ Sage w/192 Megs of RAM
 
I have just run through some of the other boards on this and it does seem as though Macs of all sorts run at different rates.

There are all kinds of fixes out there and some work on a particular machine and not on another identicle machine. The latter would suggest some setup or some subtle hardware revision differences, but nothing concrete.

I am on an old B&W G3 450/512, MacOSX seems to be running along just fine, running off an old external SCSI disk, with no optimisations at all, surely I should be getting the some of the worst problems. But I'm not, why? I can't believe is all down to the size of the RAM.

This is not a complaint, just curious thats all.

 
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