Slow imac G5

Huw01

Registered
Hi All,
I've an iMac G5 1.8 17".
I'm not very happy with it to be honest- physically its great but my god is slow! My 1.2 G4 iBook is faster when applications start, saving files etc.

Before buying, I read up on the reviews which stated that it was a nice machine which lacked memory and thus ordered another 512meg of memory. I'm beginning to wonder if I've done something daft with the ammount of memory I've installed...

I may be asking a completly stupid question here :confused: but should I have installed enough memory to fit into some kind of doubling rule? (i.e. 32M / 64M/ 128/ 256/ 512/ 1028 etc)

Thanks in advance....
Huw
 
You don't need to, but it shouldn't be awfully slow either. Installing memory in identical pairs in the iMac G5 will give you the full data path.

Have you repaired permissions on the drive? Ran fsck in single user mode?

When this is happening, is the slowness all the time, or only after the machine has been running for a while? You might want to run top on your machine to see if you have some stuck processes that are coming on during boot and just staying with you from previous software installs or such. I have an iMac G5 at home as a test box and its usually quite fast. :)
 
Go3iverson said:
Have you repaired permissions on the drive? Ran fsck in single user mode?

When this is happening, is the slowness all the time, or only after the machine has been running for a while? You might want to run top on your machine to see if you have some stuck processes that are coming on during boot and just staying with you from previous software installs or such. I have an iMac G5 at home as a test box and its usually quite fast. :)

Thanks for the quick reply. I use my machines for work and usually run only office apps. It is very slow all the time - it takes good minute to get the desktop fully set up - ie time/ date, icons and the finder bar.

I'm not very technical (as you may have guessed) and wouldn't know where to begin repairing permissions. I've no idea what fsck is (but will be researching it after this post...).

Is 'top' a program I can download from somewhere?

Cheers again,
Huw
 
Just for a laugh, go into your energy saver panel and see where the processor setting is set...there is a low, automatic and full....if its set to low that wouldn't help.

My wife has 1.8 G5 imac as well, it smokes along pretty good....

later
Tim
 
Look at the energy settings TimR brought up. It shouldn't be set to lower than automatic out of the box, but you never know! :)

Eh, instead of top, you can go into your Applications folder -> Utilities -> Activity Monitor. Have it show you all processes and sort them by CPU usage. This will show you what's actually going on inside your system, which is helpful! :)

To run fsck, reboot your machine holding down the Apple and S keys. You'll boot into a black screen with white text. When the text stops writing, type fsck -yf and hit return. This will attempt to check and fix your system. If errors are found, run it again, until it comes back clean. Then, type reboot (you should always reboot after modifying your system in this way), hit return, and see where you are. Its one of the most important troubleshooting tools in OS X. :)
 
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