[DeepDish]

My April 2002 iBook 600 seemed a little snappy. But now, it just crawls. Opening GoLive and my website can take 4 mins. Opening iPhoto, forget about it. Time to go make a sandwich. Everythings seems sluggish. I noticed a small difference upgrading to 10.2. But now I am crawling along again.

Is there something I should be doing to keep my system lean and mean and clean and snappy?

I tried Jaguar Cache Cleaner, but not much difference.

Any advice?

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Run a permissions check and check how much Hard Drive space you have left.

[Adam Betts]

Get CockTail from www.versiontracker.com and do every job it have in there.

[dampeoples]

How much RAM? 10.2 crawls on my iBook 500 with 384MB (with more than a few apps open), it also has the 66MHz bus.

[Severed Hand of Skywalker]

Originally posted by dampeoples:
How much RAM? 10.2 crawls on my iBook 500 with 384MB (with more than a few apps open), it also has the 66MHz bus.

Same, I bumed it to 600 megs and it doesn't feel at all faster.

[DeepDish]

Thanks guys.

Plenty of HD space left, 6 gigs.

Plenty of RAM, or atleast it should be, 512.

It is so frustrating. It use to feel snappier. But now it is driving me crazy.

My buying cycle for macs is 3-4 years. I can't afford any more than that.

But one year. Come on Apple.

I use to let people watch me open apps.

But now I hide my screen whenever I reboot or launch anything. I am too embarressed.

Where oh where did my happy snappy mac go?

[Sharky K.]

it was better to reinstall 10.2 than update 10.1 to 10.2

Maybe it is a time to reinstall the system if you can't solf it?

[Mastrap]

Originally posted by DeepDish:


Where oh where did my happy snappy mac go?

If it is as bad as you say then there are two possible reasons for this:

1: It's somehow hardware related. Check with the hardware check disk that came with your iBook and see if the diagnostics come back with anything. Could your extra RAM have become unseated? Is your drive on its way out? Computers do not slow down for no reason, there's got to be something behind this.

2: If everything checks out fine then I'd recommend checking out Disksweeper which has been developed by the Omni Group.

Personally I do a clean system install every twelve months. It gets rid of any accumulated rubbish and keeps the machine in good condition. If you've got a chance to back your /user/documents/ and /user/preferences/ folders up somewhere this is a pretty painless thing to do.

There is no reason at all why you couldn't get your iBook back to the state it was in when you've bought it. Like all good tools it does need maintenance ever now and then.

[Mohammed Al-Sabah]

had the same prob once with my pb500... what i did is back up everything i needed

erase disk and re instaled everything and took out OS9 cuz i never used it anways... try that see what happens and give us an update!

[DeepDish]

I had to reinstall 10.2 on a computer today at work. There was an option to save my users and settings. But I don't this was a clean install, just a re-install on top of itself.

I just don't like re-installing all of my software with a clean install.

Great, now I am a whiner too.

But I did upgrade to 10.2 from 10.1.

Maybe a nice clean install would be worth an afternoon.

Thanks guys.

[kovacs]

Originally posted by DeepDish:
I had to reinstall 10.2 on a computer today at work. There was an option to save my users and settings. But I don't this was a clean install, just a re-install on top of itself.

I just don't like re-installing all of my software with a clean install.

Great, now I am a whiner too.

But I did upgrade to 10.2 from 10.1.

Maybe a nice clean install would be worth an afternoon.

Thanks guys.

It shouldn't take a whole afternoon, first make a backup of your home directory and maybe even of your applications folder, then wipe your drive and install Jaguar and all the system updates, then drag apps en prefs to your new system, this will work perfectly for most shareware and freeware apps, you don't loose your prefs and you don't have to redownload them or reenter serials, you keep all your bookmarks and even your mail ( pretty painless if you ask me ). However it's probably safer to install big apps like Golive and Office from the CD. Good luck

[mmurray]

A couple of things you might like to do:

My favourite is to go into system preferences and make a new user. Then log in as that user and see how things run. This way you run without any of the pref's in your Preferences folder. It probably won't help but its easier than a reinstall :-)

Also you can run Macjanitor (its at
www.versiontracker.com). This does various cleaning up of log files and stuff which usually happens at night but only if the machine is awake. On the other hand I assume (not sure) that this all runs when you reboot and you are bound to have tried rebooting.

Finally go into Terminal and type the command `top.' See if anything is claiming lots of CPU. Again this sort of thing should be fixed by a reboot.

Do you find its sluggish all the time or does it take awhile to get sluggish after you reboot ?
From what you write it doesn't sound like that.

If all these things are OK I guess it could be disk fragmentation. So you have 6 gig but its all over the place in little bits. Is there lots of disk activity ? There are utilities to fix disk fragmentation but if you can manage it a reformat may be simplest. It depends how hard backing up and restoring is for you :-(

Michael

[CheesePuff]

Yeah, I would just recommend doing a reformat of the drive. Backup your home directory and any other files you want, and then put in the Mac OS X 10.2 CD-ROM and erase the hard drive and install OS X again.

[Colonel Panic]

check top!!!

you may have installed a driver or something that is eating a lot of CPU cycles...

[Arkham_c]

Originally posted by Colonel Panic:
check top!!!

you may have installed a driver or something that is eating a lot of CPU cycles...

Glad someone said it. It may be an HP printer or scanner driver.