MacOS X? Nice but simply too slow ...

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bender

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I've been working for one month now with my new G4/800 and MacOS X. I have to say that the OS itself and its functionalities are great. Nice crossplatform networking and some other nice and well thought features.

But it's simply too slow to be used as a professional machine. Finder speed, especially building up and closing windows, resizing and scrolling is unaceptable slow.

From this point of view I'm very disappointed with my new and compared to PCs, very expensive machine. I've bought a completly new machine in order to be more productive, but I'm faster with my old, updated G3/466 Mac OS 9 Mac.

Apple MUST speed up MacOS X at least by 50% to stay competitive to the pc world.
 
nothing wrong with the mac it's just os x isn't still fast yet in a lot of things. a lot of it still is not even optimized. apple must re write the finder entirely and is working on this. this will be a big big difference and improovement when it happens. it is said they will have a new finder in 10.3 and tons of 10.3.x updates as the finder will need tweaking still and finally by 10.4 or 10.5 it will be completely re done and optimized.
 
I definitly hope so.

Is it right that the current finder has been programmed in carbon and the reprogrammed finder will be built up with cocoa? Or am I mixing up something here?
 
What bothers me about OS X to no extent is the fact that dialog boxes and popup windows are so slow in appearing and windows don't gain and lose focus quickly. In OS 9 when you went to empty the trash or open preferences in some application the dialog box would pop up instantly and all the options were available instantly. Working within the dialog box was quick and snappy. Now in OS X dialog boxes are sluggish. First the outline of the box appears, then the buttons, then the text. Usually the spinning disk is a spinning while this is happening. Of course this happens in an acceptable amount of time but when I compare it to OS 9 and my Windows XP machine OS X starts to look bad. I thought maybe this would be my computer, a 500 MHz G3 but my uncle's 733 MHz G4 displays the exact same behavior.

I know this will be fixed by Apple with the upcoming releases of OS X...10.2, 10.3, etc. I just hope that Steve gives us a little assurance sometime soon that OS 10.2 is coming and will be faster.
 
That's right Biff. Apple should focus on optimizing MacOS X especially since it is the preinstalled OS.

Users that have for example a Mac at the office running MacOS 9 might decide to buy an iMac for home business and get a newer machine that's "much slower" than the older one in the office. They will be very upset...
 
this subject has been debated to death on this site, but if you guys want to do it one more time be my guests. ;)

bottom line everytime - yes it still needs some work. but the stability of being able to keep working without crashes makes up for the lack of perceived speed. and the two do trade off. you cannot have the lightening quickness and have the stablility. that day is a long ways away. so decide which you want - weeks or months without forced reboots and lost data or a faster finder.

btw - there are also lots of threads already around on how you can speed it up a little and how to keep it fromming slowing down over time.:cool:
 
Maybe it's because I'm passionately in love with Mac OS X (figuratively speaking), but I just don't buy this stuff about it being too slow, especially coming from you lucky bastards with G4/800s. :rolleyes:

I agree that the interface is much slower and in many cases even choppy compared to OS 9 and its predecessors, but I think this is more than made up for by the memory management etc. in OS X.

As I write this I have Mozilla, Mail, Proteus, Preview and TexShop open, and my little grape iMac G3/400 is running as fast as it does with only one or two apps open. I never even thought of running five apps at a time under OS 9, but in X I rarely have less than that running at any time.

I don't know if I'm just lucky and haven't had any problems with OS X yet, but I am consistently amazed at how much I can get done - or could, if I could stop going to VersionTracker every half an hour to check for new freeware I could use. ;)

I don't know if this helps, but I very rarely (if ever) use Classic, and I turn my computer off every night so it can sleep when I do. Maybe there are some memory leaks or something. In any case, I just felt I had to step in and defend my all-time favorite OS, even if I don't really have anything valuable to say. Especially since I should be writing a paper right now. :eek:

-the valrus
 
I think the only solution to this problem would be to hardware accelerate quartz. Cause it isn´t, right? The processor is working at 100% to just resize a window :(

Or am I totaly on the wrong track here? :confused:
 
Ya I had a new 700 mhz G3 , they have discontinued that imac so I am now asking for a G3 600 ( they aernt so pyched by the idea but that damn G3 700 was a headache from day 1 ) . I would rather grab an ibook but alas , they are still a bit pricy .

The G3 700 imac I got was messed up , it must be the chipset or something . I like OS X but thats cause I can play with it and I had given up on macs a few years ago besides using them to surf the web ( and hack around with ppc linux ) .

OS X Aqua is buggy , try out X 11 download and a window feature like gnome or kde .

It all depends what you are into , the fact you can just open a terminal and telnet or use lynx got my respect back for apple .

I have found having OS X on its own partition works best . I want to become a pro mac OS X tech so I can get paid to fix all these bugs .

I sympathise for the unix newbies , its a long hard ride figuring out unix and the last thing you want is a buggy OS . For the unix oldtimers and intermediate users like myself software bugs are just problems to resolve .

Try out opera to surf the web , thats my advice and check out how your memory is configed in your system .
 
OK, I'm running OS X on an LCD iMac G4 (800 MHz) and it's perfectly smooth. It as fast as OS 9 in every aspect and sometimes it is faster (file copies, etc.) Also the time wasted rebooting OS 9 is now time I can use!

First off, download Mozilla 0.9.9, change its theme to "Modern" (the default, "Classic", is crap) and see if you don't immediately stop complaining about OS X's speed. Web pages over broadband load in a second and usually less. Next, run prebinding with XOptimize a few times. Restart. Reset your PRAM a few times. Believe me, if your system is relatively recent, these few steps will speed up OS X's "percieved speed"... OS X is actually much much faster than OS 9, it's just that the GUI isn't. Remember before there were QuickDraw video accelerators? The GUI was SOOO slow. When Apple started using real graphics cards in their systems, OS 8 and on started to feel really fast. The same thing will have to happen with OS X. Eventually, there will be Quartz video accelerators. That leaves those of us who just bought a new Mac out in the cold, but OS X is certainly fast enough for me...
 
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