Mac OS X Speed

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RoachKilla299

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I recently installed Mac OS X.1.2 on my 266 iMac w/ 160 mb RAM. It's a little bit slower than os9. How can I speed things up besides getting more RAM which I am going to get. Someone please help.
 
I am not really sure as my old iMac Rev. D (which my iBook replaced effective today) seemed faster in os x 10.1.2. One method might be to get a PowerLogix iForce G# or G4 upgrade.
 
There is also a upgrade from Sonnet that will give you 500mhz G3 and a firewire port.

other then upgrading ram and the cpu I really don't know what you can do to speed up OSX. does anybody else have anything else helpful?
 
two little programs will help - Xoptimize and broadband optimizer. both can be found by searching either www.versiontracker.com or www.macupdate.com. neither are going to do as much as ram but they're a start. unless you just reformatted, there is also a good chance that defragmenting and optimizing your disk will put some more zip into it as well.

to some extent you can just expect many things in x to just not be lightening quick with your hardware.

happy holidays.:)
 
Originally posted by Tapp_darden
other then upgrading ram and the cpu I really don't know what you can do to speed up OSX. does anybody else have anything else helpful?
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More RAM and a upgrade to the hard drive will help when launching apps. The drives in the older iMacs were small and slow compared to what you get today.
Make sure you run in thousands of colors too, instead of the default which is set to millions.
 
you defrag & optimize by using a third party program designed to do these tasks. Techtool pro, plus optimizer (partner to diskwarrior) and speed disk (norton utilities) are the three i have used.

1. techtool pro - also a good diagnostic and repair tool, includes a virus checker. is perhaps the best value of all. defrag is done seperately from optimization and will at times only defrag if certain conditions are not met. claims to be completely safe in preventing loss of data in case of interruption. drawback - slowest of the three.

2. optimizer plus - can be bought alone or with diskwarrior - i recommend getting the combo. diskwarrior saved my drive when all others failed recently. op is also interuption safe and does partials in case of obstacles. it is slightly faster than TTP.

3. speed disk - part of Norton utilities which also diagnoses and repairs. fastest of them all. can lose all your data if interrupted. defrags and optimizes in one sweep but will not circumvent obstacles. least recommended but the one most people have because they advertise and promote the most .

the latest version of all these work with osx but must be run from another disk using 9.
 
Originally posted by SCrossman


More RAM and a upgrade to the hard drive will help when launching apps. The drives in the older iMacs were small and slow compared to what you get today.
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You may not want to get the fastest harddrive for any old iMac(rev A-D) I read in a Macworld or a Machome that replacing the harddrive with one that runs at 7200 rpm may create to much heat. they sudjested you stick with the slower rpm.

You wouldn't want to let your little iMac get to hot.

P.S. If you do upgrade your mac in some way. let me know how it went. I my self use a Rev D iMac. And I plan on putting OSX on at some point. I would love to hear what upgrades you did perform and how well it went.
 
I could be wrong, but I thought the caution about 7200RPM hard drives applied to the newer slot-loading iMacs, which don't have cooling fans. The Rev. A-D series with cooling fans should be able to handle the faster drives.
 
I just wrote a very long reply. but i had to login?!? and so I lost my post. I'll keep it short this time.

I checked the mag again and it was fairly clear. it said all iMacs.

I also went to the apple store and the guy behind the genius bar said to use 5400 RPM drives.

7200 drives will work. but if it makes the CPU to hot your iMac may become unstable.

Has anyone put in a 7200 in a iMac? if so, How did it go?
 
I have a imac dv with slot loading cdrom drive,384 mb,10 gb. I am definitly going to upgrade to at least a 60gb hd with 7200 rpm. Will this over heating thing affect my imac.
 
I cannot imagine that the difference in heat disappation is that much greater with a 7200rpm drive when compared to a 5400rpm model. I would think a greater affect of temperature is induced by the ambient room temperature changes. During the summer, when it was 90 degrees in the room, my iMac never was any less stable compared to when it is 68 degrees now during winter. The faster drives should not induce an extra 22 degrees into the chassis, and even if it did, it would fare no worse than when using it in the summer months.
Certainly, you don't want to fry your iMac, but you will love the extra speed from the faster drives.
 
and from some of what i have seen, it may depend on the drive. look around and you will see that some 7200's use a fan and some do not. may just have to do with how well the drive is designed and the article may have been written during early days of 7200's.

just a thought, not an endorsement of anything.:cool:
 
Drives with fans, hmmm! I have not seen any of those yet. I just ordered 6 Fujitsu 36gb SCSI Ultra 160 15000rpm drives for a new RAID 5 box I am putting on the NT 2k servers here at work. I wonder how hot those babies will be compared to the 7200rpm drives in our older raid box. In fact, I am going to locate our thermaspot gadget that can read temperatures at the end of a probe and take reading on the current 18gb 7200rpm and the 36gb 15k drives when I put them in service next week. I am excited to put these drives in, as they have something like 3.6ms seek time.
 
yea, i never heard of a drive with a fan either until i bought one recently. then i noticed some ads for some others claiming that they didn't need fans!! everyday is full of amazements isn't it!!:D

i can't say that i really like the sound of the fan quite frankly and am still debating if i want to keep it. fry's gives me 30 days to decide so...
 
Originally posted by SCrossman
I cannot imagine that the difference in heat disappation is that much greater with a 7200rpm drive when compared to a 5400rpm model. I would think a greater affect of temperature is induced by the ambient room temperature changes. During the summer, when it was 90 degrees in the room, my iMac never was any less stable compared to when it is 68 degrees now during winter. The faster drives should not induce an extra 22 degrees into the chassis, and even if it did, it would fare no worse than when using it in the summer months.
Certainly, you don't want to fry your iMac, but you will love the extra speed from the faster drives.
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I just bought a 7200 and put it in my iMac. you guys said it would be ok!! It has become unstable. Sometimes after I leave it on for a number of hours(seven at most) it wont shut down, just hangs(I don't even get the spinning beach ball) Today, the modem, sound, monitor and date/time were stuck( I could still pull-down menus) when I tried to start any program it would bounce for a very long time then stop, but not do anything(right-clicking on the icon produced the "application not responding") running programs seemed to be ok. I could navigate within finder. Although I couldn't get Terminal.app, console, or anything else to start. Logout, Shutdown, and restart did not work(sleep did) pressing the power button on the keyboard did not work.

I removed the cover of my iMac leaving the bottom exposed. I had hope this would help with the heat problem(if that is the problem) and the sides of the computer seem to be a lot cooler(but what indiction is that?) are there anyprograms that I could dl to test the temputer inside of my computer? CPU heat and such? or can I buy any hardware?
Is there anyway I could further cool down my iMac? I don't think fans on harddrives would fit...
 
Find a fan that you can use to push air through it, just to see if it is heat causing your problem. I think something else is wrong, as I stated the heat output from that drive cannot be that much greater than a 5400 rpm drive. My iMac was running fine, and it was 95 degrees in this room on Monday. So was my cube OK. No hard drive is going to raise the temperature inside the iMac as much as the internal room temp will.
 
I have a 7200 RPM drive in my 266 iMac and leave it running constantly... Never had stability problems or overheating. Still running strong after a year and a half of never shutting down the Mac.
 
Not all hard drives are equal.

I have a 7200 RPM IBM hard drive from a year or two ago, and its quiet and cool as can be.

I have a 7200 RPM maxtor HD that is noisy and runs considerably hotter.

This is not an endorsement of certain companies, I am not saying IBM is better than maxtor, only that each drive [model] is different and you should take care to reach benchmarks of the drive you have decided on purchasing before you actually get it. This can save you a lot of trouble in the future.

Just some general advice.
 
what hard drive did you put in your iMac tk4two1? I put a Western Digital in mine. I put a clean install of OSX, so I cant see how it is a software problem... Besides, if both a major mac mag and the apple people behind the bar at the apple store all say that heat from a 7200rpm hard drive would be something to worry about in imacs rev A-D. then I tend to think twice. I checked to make sure that this drive would not get hot.... but maybe I did not do enough research on it.... for what it is worth, I cant hear the drive.

What fan could I get? have you seen the inside of one of these things? not much(if any) room.

I'll do some more testing... Maybe some files did get corrupted from the first crash.... I would tend to put the blame on the hard drive, because I started having the problems after I installed it, not before.
 
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