[Pele2048]

So at one point, I dropped my 15" Aluminum Powerbook. Bent the upper and lower case halves near the optical drive. Obviously Apple wanted far too much ($600) to repair it back to original configuration...

eBay to the rescue and my machine gained a lighted keyboard, A new 160 GB 7200 RPM hard drive (Up from the 80 GB 4500 RPM) and a DVD-RW drive that's faster than the Superdrive (Replaced the DVD-ROM CD-RW combo drive.) for only $300. (It got upgraded to 1GB of RAM shortly after I bought it originally.)

For a while I was running the original hard drive in a FireWire case, external to the machine because I didn't have the original OS CDs to load onto the new hard drive. After a while, the filesystem decided it didn't like that and decided to die. I was forced to buy a new copy of OS X retail.

After a fresh load of OS 10.5, I thought it was running great.

Typical tasks, such as simple YouTube Videos, or loading GIMP seem to take forever... These same tasks worked properly, even through the inefficient setup of a slow drive in a FireWire case... I don't remember GIMP taking five minutes to load. (Though I didn't load it that frequently, as I had a bootleg copy of Adobe Photoshop on the old drive that's since unrecoverable.) Even as I write this, I notice that the screen is about ten letters behind my typing and I'm not a very fast typist.

I don't get it. On a Windows box, I'd scan for Spyware and other crap... But the Mac isn't susceptible to these problems; That's kinda why I bought it some years and years ago.

I understand that this machine is old, but a browser with flash, an image manipulation program, or a simple video shouldn't tax a 1GHz processor with 1GB of RAM. What gives? This machine should still have some form of useful life left in it.

[cms]

You need more RAM. Leopard itself needs a gig of RAM to run properly with some wriggle room, so you need additional RAM to run your programs. You probably know this already but Flash in your browser really does gobble RAM. And image manipulation programs are very greedy too – despite what the developers say about minimum system specs.

[gooser]

sometimes running the latest software on older hardware can cause problems.

[cms]

Originally Posted by gooser 

sometimes running the latest software on older hardware can cause problems.

Should be no problem running Leopard on an alu PB, provided there's enough RAM. I have many clients who do so very successfully indeed. By the way, Leopard is hardly the "latest software" but that's probably irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, given that Snow Leopard won't run on a PowerPC.

[Pele2048]

Got it:
OS is a resource hog. Buy RAM.

Shopping at Crucial now.


I had no clue that Flash is such a resource hog, nor that 10.5 was the "Latest" software... Just the latest that would run on the G4.
I didn't even know that there were underlying changes between 10.3 that came on the laptop (With originally 256 MB RAM) Just additional little features that I don't even use... Time Machine and the like.

Honestly, I don't think I need a new machine. I surf the net, write some stuff in Word, edit the occasional video off my camcorder or the occasional photo off my digital camera... This machine did it a few years ago. The camera hasn't changed. My use hasn't changed.

I don't understand the rationale behind buying a new machine every year or two. Which is why I originally bought a Macintosh. Buddy of mine had a Pismo G3 500 MHz with OS X and I had a Dell P3 500 MHz with Win2kPro. Equal RAM, Equal Hard drives... Hell, even same ATI Rage Mobility graphics chip. His could run circles around mine. Editing movies, photos... Even games, running Quake or Unreal Tournament. From then on, I was kinda sold on the Mac for a practical work horse.

[reader50]

I agree on the add-RAM part. Two other points come to mind:

PowerBooks will run slightly faster under Tiger (10.4.x) - the jump to Leopard speeded up x86 Macs, but PPC macs took a few percent speed penalty. Benchmarks supported this when Leopard came out, and I've observed it myself. The difference is not large though. Tiger does need less RAM.

It sounds like you continued to boot from your external (old) drive, while using the internal as your new data drive. Then presently installed Leopard on it. In other words, your OS install is now scattered over a (former) data drive. The OS files will be all over the place, very unoptimized. This may greatly slow down bootup, by inserting lots of random seeks. It will carry a smaller penalty when launching apps, and shouldn't affect running speed within apps. A disk defrag utility would help, mostly by improving bootup time.

[Pele2048]

Originally Posted by reader50 

I agree on the add-RAM part. Two other points come to mind:

PowerBooks will run slightly faster under Tiger (10.4.x) - the jump to Leopard speeded up x86 Macs, but PPC macs took a few percent speed penalty. Benchmarks supported this when Leopard came out, and I've observed it myself. The difference is not large though. Tiger does need less RAM.

It sounds like you continued to boot from your external (old) drive, while using the internal as your new data drive. Then presently installed Leopard on it. In other words, your OS install is now scattered over a (former) data drive. The OS files will be all over the place, very unoptimized. This may greatly slow down bootup, by inserting lots of random seeks. It will carry a smaller penalty when launching apps, and shouldn't affect running speed within apps. A disk defrag utility would help, mostly by improving bootup time.

Nah, the drive was formatted NTFS in my Panasonic Toughbook after I bought it for testing. (I got two... Do you know how hard it is to find Parallel ATA 2.5" 7200 RPM drives?!) I didn't have the install disks for the OS at the time and forgot Disk Utility sits in the /Applications/Utilities folder. Fresh format to Journaled HFS+ when I got 10.5

I had a buddy that was gonna hook me up with a bootleg copy of 10.4 but he lost his install disks too.

As a side note, I feel so weird actually BUYING software. It feels wrong.