Speeding up my sawtooth

Carlo

Carlo

All your base are belong
Hi all.

I was wondering your opinions on the area of desktop speed, specifically moving windows around and navigating around aqua. My mac is a little sluggish when moving between screens and resizing and I put it down to the speed of the system. (g4 450)

But I was playing with a similar machine (well speed anyway) being a g4 powerbook with similar mhz.. and its considerably faster.

so my question is

Would me changing the video card help, my mac has the stocko ATI Rage that they put into the sawtooths.

If so then what can I get that will go into my mac. I dont play games so im not to fussed.

My System specs
g4 450 (sawtooth model)
640Meg Ram
20gig ultra ata hdd
osx 10.1.5
Ati Rage 128 Pro (AGP)
 
I have the same problem with my G4/400 mac with much the same specs. I want to use OS X as my main OS but have to keep switching back to OS 9 due to the speed of X. I bought 256mb of RAM to try to improve the situation but it made no difference. What causes the sluggish performance? Video card, processor speed, hard drive or is it just down to the OS? I dread to think what OS X would run like on a G3!! Is speed going to be improved in Jaguar or is it going to put even more demands on the system???

My specs are:

G4/400 AGP
Rage Pro Card
40/20 gb hard drives
512MB Ram
 
I have a blue clamshell ibook (G3 300 + 160MB RAM) and OSX version 10.1.5 is performing fine. The time to boot the machine is a bit long but I got used to it. It is my first mac and I am happy with it, the only thing which I don't like is the low 800x600 resolution and the small 3 GB HD. Thats the the reason I'll switch to an emac.
Resizing Windows is no problem even if ~7 of the resource demanding apps (Photoshop etc) are runnin' with million of colors (more on on a 800x600 res and the screen gets really crowded.) I am really suprised how OSX performs on a machine wich is at the bottom of the system requirement... Now with the latest OSX upgrade the Quicktime is HW accelerated so I can view movies in fullscreen with my ibook without slowdown.
 
OS X runs perfectly on my G4/400 which is overclocked to 500 MHz. It only has a cheap ATI Rage 128 Pro card, but 576 MB of RAM, which really speeds the system up.

You could try to go to the Terminal and type

sudo update_prebinding -root /

and press enter. Then enter your admin password and press enter. It takes about 5-20 minutes.
That should speed things up :)
 
Your machine is similar to mine..

I am planning to get a geforce 4 card for my machine and see if that improve it. Anohter thought is that it might be worth updating the drivers of the rage card.

Originally posted by dslmatt
I have the same problem with my G4/400 mac with much the same specs. I want to use OS X as my main OS but have to keep switching back to OS 9 due to the speed of X. I bought 256mb of RAM to try to improve the situation but it made no difference. What causes the sluggish performance? Video card, processor speed, hard drive or is it just down to the OS? I dread to think what OS X would run like on a G3!! Is speed going to be improved in Jaguar or is it going to put even more demands on the system???

My specs are:

G4/400 AGP
Rage Pro Card
40/20 gb hard drives
512MB Ram
Click to expand...
 
I have a B&W G3 that I upgraded to a G4 450. I added a Radeon 7000 PCI graphics card and 896 MB of RAM.

OS X is sluggish, there's no denying it. Then again, there are certain instances when I'm playing on my friends dual-GHz G4, and to be honest, while it is smoother to a point, the operations still seem like they lag a little.

I can honestly say getting a new graphics card won't help 10.1.5 for you. Perhaps Jaguar, but not the current release of OS X. And Jaguar will run smoother on ALL machines, even G3's, beause from what I've seen of the UI, it seems as though they remade all the widgets, buttons, tabs, etc to be less complex, which will reduce the size of the graphics that need to be manipulated to give you your nice OS X experience. At least that's what I'm hoping for.
 
I hope so. I did find that Apple done this with Mac OS 7 through to 9. Starting out on Mac OS 7 I found it a similar experience to X (speed wise!) and Apple gradually improved the OS making it faster and more stable.

Bottom line is, if Apple want us to embrace their new OS they need to make it more than a shiny, pretty system. I personally want it to be fast and practical. I did'nt buy a G4 to have it run like my old performa 5400! :p :) That's why I am still using OS9...
 
I run a Quadra 660 a/v with 52MB of RAM (that's 25MHz 68040 folks!) at work with OS 8.1. It has about the same performance as my G4 450 with 896 MB of RAM with 10.1.5. Granted, I can't DO most of the stuff I can do with my G4 on that Quadra (although it does have killer video capabilities in its own right), but for day to day stuff, word, internet, etc., its about the same.

scary.
 
old imac here and i will never understand what you guys with these big mac-chines have to complain about. window resizing is almost instant. (ok, it takes a half second :eek: ). in fact i get faster, smoother window resizing than i did in os 9.

someday i will have to see one of these slow expensive machines inaction so i will know what people are talking about :p
 
KSV, these are the results i received after i tried your suggestion. What exactly does this mean and what can I do to fix it?

Number of non-prebound files: 0
Number of files that may need to be re-prebound : 1096
Number of files re-prebound: 18
Number of files unsuccessfully prebound: 33
2002-07-23 01:45:40.153 update_prebinding[799] update_prebinding done.
2002-07-23 01:45:40.153 update_prebinding[799] End of update_prebinding


Thanks!
 
Originally posted by thedbp

I can honestly say getting a new graphics card won't help 10.1.5 for you. Perhaps Jaguar, but not the current release of OS X. And Jaguar will run smoother on ALL machines, even G3's, beause from what I've seen of the UI, it seems as though they remade all the widgets, buttons, tabs, etc to be less complex, which will reduce the size of the graphics that need to be manipulated to give you your nice OS X experience. At least that's what I'm hoping for.
Click to expand...

I hope so, the difference between 10.0 and 10.1 was noticable. Its funny how the hardware was light years ahead of the os in the classic days and now its the other way around.
 
Okay, so there are people content with the speed of OS X on their G3 based iMacs. And there are people *not* content with the speed of their Dual GHz G4s.

My guess (and fear) is that those people also won't be content with what 10.2 will offer them. Because they focus on what's slow instead of what's fast.

Okay, Mac OS X is slow (or not). Let's forget about it and get on with our work, which we can do very fast on Mac OS X because of the things that ARE fast, okay?
 
Yes but honestly what is so fast about OS X?

If the gui is slow then its going to lag everything by a little bit.

Multi-media until QT6 has been faster on my p3
 
Don't know why "everyone" is bashing against OSX (speedwise), As long as it is useable; I am happy (with the current speed). Hey I can even remote control my Winxp (PC) with a G3 mac without much slowdown compared to the native Windows remote control.
 
Well, OS X is hideously slow in MS Office; it shares this attribute with OS 9, for whatever this is worth.

I have a reason to believe that this stems from the fact (is it a fact? it sure feels like it) that Office renders to GDI (Windows Metafile is serialized access to GDI) which has to be translated to Mac display model; this takes unpalatable amount of time.

On the other hand, current PPC has a serious performance drawback compared to x86, especially in integer and byte-addressed domain. Older G4s win on L2 cache, but even that is lost nowadays.

Frankly, if I were shopping for a new machine (this is out of the question for the next 4 years, until these boxes have been written off), I would be somewhat undecided; however, the integration of MS Office with UNIX would still be likely to prevail over raw speed.
 
I went to the apple store and played with a powerbook (400mhz) and a dual 1gig machine. both where heaps faster in the gui than my machine.

So if its not cpu & video what is the cause of the speed delay.
 
When i typed in sudo update_prebinding -root / in the terminal i get
We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System
Administrator. It usually boils down to these two things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.

Password:


and when i do enter it it says incorect pass.
 
Macer,

The first time you use sudo or root you will get that message. Do you have root enabled? Are you an authorized administrator on the machine? I've also heard of problems when people change your password. So you might want to try your old password.
 
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