Turning off Aqua goodies for performance

ilo

Registered
OS X 10.1 is still very heavy on my iMac 350, despite the improvement performance-wise from 10.0.x. Simple tasks such as window-resizing (yes, I'm the kind of user who does actually resize the window a lot), moving through menus, and scrolling are not fast enough for me to use my Mac and 10.1 as a day-to-day box. And I won't even mention web-browsing, no matter the browser.

As much as I would like to see improvements in these points by way of further optimisation from Apple and the release of higher version apps from 3rd party vendors, at this point I want to use 10.1 as my day-to-day OS, and hence I became interested in reducing the load of the OS as much as possible. I've noticed that the following measures will improve performance at the cost of aqua-prettiness:

1. Turning off all the anti-aliasing options with Tinkertools
2. Using 'shadow killer' to disable all the shadows surrounding windows and menus

I've also heard of themes which disable transparent menus, although I wasn't able to get one running in 10.1.

I would like to hear about any other such measures to improve the performance of 10.1, even if it implies a sacrifice of GUI prettiness.. After all, I'm mainly going to use the developer tools, and I can afford to do without fancy eye-candy that slows down my coding.
 
really?

I have a beige 266, and 10.1 is faster for me than 9.2.1 is... I'm not going back to 9.x if I have any say about it :)

I hardly ever get the rainbow ball, and IE is much faster under 10.1
 
Did you do a clean install or an upgrade? If you did an upgrade try the clean install... it runs much faster from what I've heard. I only do clean installs so I don't have personal experience.
 
When you say 'clean install'... do you mean:

a) getting the OSX 10.1 CD and installing on freshly formatted drive, or
b) installing OSX 10.0 on a freshly formatted drive; upgrading to 10.4 and then applying the OSX 10.1 update

I assume you mean the former.... but wanted to ask.

Simon
 
Originally posted by sadams
When you say 'clean install'... do you mean:

a) getting the OSX 10.1 CD and installing on freshly formatted drive, or
b) installing OSX 10.0 on a freshly formatted drive; upgrading to 10.4 and then applying the OSX 10.1 update

I assume you mean the former.... but wanted to ask.

Simon

Actually a mix of the 2.

I had 10.0.4 on it's own partition. When I got the update CD, I ran the installer, and selected format target. Then 10.1 installed on the newly formatted drive.

I only clarify to say that I didn't have the full install disc, just the update.
 
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