[Woehrle46]

Lately, something seems slow about my pismo. On SNES9X it gets lower performance than my rev. C iMac, and video files, .avi files in particular have had horrible performance, dropped frames and some higher resolution ones are just completely unusable. This is a pismo g3/400 running 10.3 with 320 mb of ram, and i recently installed a 40 gb harddrive running at 4200 rpm. The screen was broken and I am now running the system with a 17" NEC MultiSync E700, I dont think the monitor should make a difference, but maybe the powerbook having to run the external monitor may be slowing it down. Any suggestions as to how to speed this machine up would be appreciated!

[bmhome1]

R...A...M

[Lateralus]

RAM.

[Woehrle46]

Originally posted by PowerMacMan:
RAM.

I realize that adding ram would help, but from what ive been told 320 mb should be plenty for just running one or two applicaitons at one time and still have them run smoothly. The thing I really still cant figure out is why SNES9X would be slower on this machine than on an iMac 266mhz computer with 160 mb of ram. Both computers have been recently updated to panther, so the pismo should be clearly faster, right?

[rjc3]

I run a 400 pismo with 320mb RAM and have never felt that my system suffered from a lack of RAM.
I can't speak to the RAM requirements of SNES emulation, but my initial thoughts are that lack of RAM i snot he problem.
When you installed Panther, did you do a clean install or upgrade? I'd recommend wiping the drive and installing a fresh copy of panther.

[rjc3]

alternatively, I have also experienced dramatic slow downs on my Pismo by allowing the drive to fill up. My perception is that with less than 1 GB free on teh hard drive, Panther really slows down.
Before you wipe the drive and install Panther agin, try dumping some stuff off your drive and see if that helps.

[Woehrle46]

Originally posted by rjc3:
alternatively, I have also experienced dramatic slow downs on my Pismo by allowing the drive to fill up. My perception is that with less than 1 GB free on teh hard drive, Panther really slows down.
Before you wipe the drive and install Panther agin, try dumping some stuff off your drive and see if that helps.

Thanks for the suggestions, however, I just bought a new hard drive for panther, a toshiba 40 gb 4200rpm drive, I also still have about 17 gb free on it.

I think the slowdown might be a result of using an external monitor. I dont really know if that takes up the video card's resources or not, but its my best guess at the moment.

[SEkker]

Disk Warrior can also help with speed problems associated with suboptimal directories. This can happen even with a half empty HD -- scattered files really hurt the OS.

I know with my PB667, having an old Sony 20" external monitor did have a noticable effect.

Run the machine without the monitor and see.

[fisherKing]

8megs of videoram...
so the ext monitor MAY be the problem.
if the pismo screen is completely useless, will be hard to confirm this.

try some other screen resolutions? just a thought, see if that makes a difference.

ram always helps!

[tooki]

RAM -- Mac OS X alone, after just a little bit of web browsing, can easily take up hundreds and hundreds of MB of RAM. For example, all I have running now is iChat and Safari, but already over 300MB are in use (plus a whole bunch of inactive use, which will be the first to get shoved out to VM).

tooki

[ghost_flash]

Trade up.