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JustinHoMi · May 10, 2005, 06:32 PM

Hey,

I just got a 400mhz iMac, and while it's usable, it could definitely use some help! Any tiger-compatible suggestions?

Thanks!
Justin

Chuckit · May 10, 2005, 06:52 PM

More memory and a faster hard drive. That's about what you can do, I think.

nforcer · May 10, 2005, 07:14 PM

- Download Tinkertool and set dock minimize scaling to Scale instead of Genie. Should be slightly faster when minimizing and expanding items. You should also disable "Show animation effect when opening files" and the other 2 animation options. And while you are in Tinkertool you can change the hideous Application font from Hellvetica to Lucida Grande 11, just because I work like that

- Keep the dock size fairly small so when more items are added to it it does not resize to make room. Resizing makes it scale all of its items and that takes time.
- Set the Date and Time preferences so it only shows Hours:Minutes (this might be the default). With seconds on, it has to redraw every second and that takes a slight amount of time.
- Keep the Desktop clean if possible. Items on the desktop are actually little windows. More windows on the screen generally take longer to draw (varies by situation).
- Set the screensaver to something simple, like "Computer Name" instead of "Flurry". If you go away for a while and leave tasks in the background, they should complete faster if a complex screensaver is not taking up additional resources.
- Replace all Java apps with something Carbon or Cocoa. Java apps tend to be CPU intensive and generally have crappy interfaces unworthy of use anyway.
- Do not keep poorly-coded apps open when not in use. Most of the time these tend to be Java or Carbon, but Cocoa is not exempt. By poorly-coded, I mean apps that take up a lot of CPU time even when idle, like Photoshop or to an extent MS Word. You can monitor the CPU use an application takes in Activity Monitor.
- Your choice of browser is up to you. "Firefox is faster!" "Safari scrolls smoother!" "Camino is TEH GOOD!". For most pages they all render at about the same speed now. Whatever you choose, I would recommend disabling Java and plug-ins at least until you need them. Quite a few sites like to use flash advertisements or stupid Java things that take a while to load. You could consider using Omniweb and disabling both and making it so only when you click on them they load. You could also tweak animated images to only show once or not at all. Animated images like those found on "The 'NN" take CPU time when in the background.
- iChat seems to get particularly slow with large chats. Adium and Proteus do not. As an added bonus they handle other IM services like MSN and Yahoo so you do not need more apps open to talk to all of your friends (even if they are not "feature complete" at this time). And as another added bonus they don't use that brushed metal crap.
- Use plaintext for email. It should be faster to edit, send, and view.
- If you need to give a speed boost to a particular app (a game perhaps?) you can find its PID in the terminal or Activity Monitor and then in the Terminal do "sudo renice -20 <PID>" where PID is the process ID. Renicing a process changes its priority, with -20 being highest priority and 20 being the lowest.
- If you do a lot of disk intensive activity do not use Filevault, and perhaps even turn off Disk Journalling in Disk Utility. Journalling is supposed to make a disk more recoverable in the event of an error but makes writing slightly (10%ish?) slower.

I'll post more as I think of them. I'd recommend using no less than 512 MB of RAM if possible. If you only do web browsing, emailing, word processing and other light tasks you can probably get by with 384 MB.

JustinHoMi · May 10, 2005, 08:52 PM

How about disabling services that aren't necessary, such as Dashboard? How do I go about editing which services are setup to start at boot?

juanvaldes · May 11, 2005, 02:52 AM

play around with 'launchd'. I have not gotten into it myself but that is probably a good place to start.

Big Mac · May 11, 2005, 03:17 AM

Originally Posted by nforcer

- Download Tinkertool and set dock minimize scaling to Scale instead of Genie. Should be slightly faster when minimizing and expanding items. You should also disable "Show animation effect when opening files" and the other 2 animation options. And while you are in Tinkertool you can change the hideous Application font from Hellvetica to Lucida Grande 11, just because I work like that

Good suggestions, but scale minimization has been available as a Dock preference since Panther. Let's see, what else. You could also turn off the application launch bouncing. Both of these options are found in Dock Preferences. A RAM upgrade will definitely help, depending on how much you have. My iBook 466 is still quite usable (although I am only running Panther so I can't speak to Tiger's performance), so a 400MHz iMac is not bad at all.

JustinHoMi · May 11, 2005, 03:06 PM

I have 384MB right now, but I have some extra ram laying around here somewhere that I'll try. The iMac takes a max of 512, I believe. I did notice that Mail was gobbling up 200MB ram, and over 600MB vm (24,000 emails...). I think I'm going to forget using Mail.

I'll put a seagate barracuda IV in here also... I'm sure that'll help.

play around with 'launchd'. I have not gotten into it myself but that is probably a good place to start.

I don't see any configuration files for launchd, and the LaunchDaemons folder is empty.

JustinHoMi · May 11, 2005, 03:26 PM

I take that back... I forgot that spotlight only searches your home directory. I did find some stuff, but nothing that would allow me to disable dashboard. And in all honesty, I'm not sure what many of the daemons do. Do you know if dashboard is known by any other name? There's gotta be a way to disable it.

discotronic · May 11, 2005, 03:30 PM

Originally Posted by JustinHoMi

I have 384MB right now, but I have some extra ram laying around here somewhere that I'll try. The iMac takes a max of 512, I believe. I did notice that Mail was gobbling up 200MB ram, and over 600MB vm (24,000 emails...). I think I'm going to forget using Mail.

I'll put a seagate barracuda IV in here also... I'm sure that'll help.

I don't see any configuration files for launchd, and the LaunchDaemons folder is empty.

Your iMac will take up to 1GB of RAM. I had a 350MHz iMac with 640MB and it ran fairly well all things considering.

Big Mac · May 11, 2005, 03:31 PM

200MBs? If Mail really requires that much RAM you have good cause to drop it. Panther Mail is currently taking less than a tenth of that. I imagine that was after an import process. You should quit and relaunch it.

JustinHoMi · May 11, 2005, 03:48 PM

Originally Posted by discotronic

Your iMac will take up to 1GB of RAM. I had a 350MHz iMac with 640MB and it ran fairly well all things considering.

Are you sure about that? I pulled a PC133 512MB chip out of an old PC and it didn't recognize it. The specs listed at lowendmac (http://lowendmac.com/imacs/dvse.shtml) suggest that it only take 512 max. Which model did you have? The one that came out in 2000 allowed 1GB ram (http://lowendmac.com/imacs/350.html), but not the earlier ones.

JustinHoMi · May 11, 2005, 03:49 PM

Originally Posted by Big Mac

200MBs? If Mail really requires that much RAM you have good cause to drop it. Panther Mail is currently taking less than a tenth of that. I imagine that was after an import process. You should quit and relaunch it.

You're right. It was taking that much ram while applying some filters. I relaunched it and it's ok.

randallina2001 · May 11, 2005, 06:42 PM

Hi folks, loaded Tiger on my YIKES!, 400Mhz, 384 mb ram. MUCH snappier than Panther, flawless install, everything works, user switching now instant instead of my normal 1 second lag, widgets update in 2 seconds, PhotoShop even opens faster. I opened my entire Adobe Creative Suite, all my Office apps, and all my Apple apps trying my best to crash it. The best I could do was a surprise safari quit.

And on top of this, the entire OS only took 21 minutes to install. Panther took an hour. What a great product, thanks Apple!