[profondorosso75]

Hi all, I have to start by saying I have a limited knowledge and level of experience with macs. I am a long time pc user. I was given a g4 powerbook 667mhz with 768mb ram by a friend. I love the screen and figured it would be good to web surf and watch videos. problem is it is terribly slow. is this model too underpowered to watch videos on youtube? I can't believe that. it came with 10.1. I thought that was the problem and read here that 10.3 was the best version of mac os for it. so I installed panther and opera, firefox and IE. well the unit is still slow. not at all robust even in normal operation. I'm not trying to start a war here but I have a 400mhz laptop (read:craptop) with xp that is MUCH faster. I don't want to get into a debate about what hardware is better or faster, that is silly. I'm just saying that I think the g4 should be considerably faster than the xp unit. latest version of flash installed btw. I'm thiniking there is some tweak or something I dont know about or maybe there is something wrong with this unit. I am able to watch a dvd and that is ok. the unit will read discs I have with data that I have made on the windows unit. however, I have discs I have made with videos(avi) files that I intended to watch using VLC in this unit and when I insert the disc, it spits them back out (mac doesn't like the taste, lol) I can't figure why. but since all I want to do with it is watch vides and surf the net I'm kinda screwed. I would really like to get this going as I can't afford a new one. any advice appreciated and thanks in advance.

[reader50]

The discs spit out most likely use file systems that the Mac does not recognize. And I'd suggest Tiger 10.4 on that machine.

Flash playback on Mac has long been a sore spot. We've had a long-running debate on this subject in the PowerMac forum. The best advice has been to install Adobe's Flash 10.1 beta.

With 10.1, Adobe is finally doing some real optimization for us. Note that as a beta version, not everything will work with it.

[profondorosso75]

turns out the spitting out of the discs is because the drive will only do -r discs and not +r. I really didn't know that. I've never come across a drive that didn't do both in the PC world so it just didn't occur to me. I feel stupid. another user in a different forum pointed it out to me. does anyone know if there is a dual format or burner drive that will fit in this unit?

[indigoimac]

That is an old enough machine that the drive may have been released before the +r -r thing was settled. And even then these are early dvd burners so they are going to be very picky about what media you use -- hell even the new slot loaders are picky, just goes with that type of drive.

Get 10.4 on that immediately, opera and firefox are much too bloated for that machine so I suggest Camino...IE was garbage on mac.

The XP unit could be "faster" for any number of reasons -- how stripped down is the installation -- and on a 400mhz machine? What is it a Pentium 3 -- if so they are pretty comparable chips so I suspect the XP machine has more memory or a faster hard drive or it's simply holding it's age better.

I've got a 1.5GHz G4 powerbook with a gig of ram that I use occasionally for web browsing and it can be painfully slow and flash video is pretty much a lost cause... not that I've put much effort into it. But either way it's an old machine and the demands of even simple web browsing have evolved significantly since the time that machine was highend.

[AKcrab]

I had a customer with an old G4 machine that was having trouble with youtube videos. In the end, we found that downgrading flash improved performance. I believe it was version 9. I can't seem to find the info on the web that led me to even try.

[macaddict0001]

I find that Opera is much faster than Camino, and Safari is also faster than Camino as well. Rendering speed should be similar between Camino and Firefox because they use the same engine. That machine should be OK for web browsing but more ram would be beneficial. 768 isn't much for tiger. Flash is just a turd on the mac, has been for a while. Youtube does offer H.264 videos. accessing them can be a bit of a pita though.
10.3 is significantly faster than 10.4 but it hasn't been supported for a while so don't expect software to be easy to find. Tiger is still reasonably well supported though. For example safari 1.3 is the latest panther version and it doesn't render modern web pages much better than IE5. Tiger supports Safari 4 though which is a much better browsing experience. ClicktoFlash is a plugin for safari that hides flash content but still allows you to click on it to view it. It also allows you to access the H.264 version of youtube videos.

Posted on my powerbook G3 Pismo 10.3.9, Opera 10.10

[P]

I'm going to echo everyone else here: 10.4 with latest Safari or the latest Firefox plus a new version of Flash. Also consider Click2Flash (for Safari) or Flashblock (for Firefox, go look among the Firefox extensions). As a bonus, 10.4 works better with DVD+R in my experience.

The DVD is a regular slimline ATA drive, I believe. Any DVD will work as a reader, but it may not necessarily work as a burner. Apple uses mostly Panasonic (Matsushita) burners, and those tend to work, but if you want to replace your drive I'd suggest you come back here with your proposed version.

Also check remaining disk space. If the drive is more than 90% full, speed degrades significantly. If the computer is old, it might help to wipe the drive and start over when you install 10.4.

[anthology123]

Are you still using the original 30-40 GB IDE hard drive on that unit? Upgrade it to at least a new 7200 rpm 160GB IDE drive. This Powerbook G4 was sold in late 2001 early 2002, its eight years old now, I just recently retired a user's 667 who had one last month for that length of time. It is running great, except for the hard drive had just started to click in places.
The old PC might have performed better also because the resolution of the screen may have been low enough, probably not close to the 1152x768 resolution of the PBG4, then again the PBG4 only has 16mb of VRAM.

[profondorosso75]

thanks all for the good advice. I am now using 10.4. In my case it seems opera is working the fastest. I went with a version 9 of flash player. now youtube working well enought to tolerate. sound/video is at least in sync, just a bit choppy but certainly useable, not like before. the optical drive being -r only is just a bummer since it's working ok I don't really want to repalce it besides it seems her on CL in new york ppl think a drive upgrade is wirth 125. if I found the drive cheap like around 20 bucks I would take it and just put it in myself. replacing the drive is a good suggestion also, I have a 40gb in there now. again a 7200 2.5 ide drive, well ppl around here act like it's gold so too exspensive. I agree though I have seen major improvmentns in speed in pc's where I upgraded the HD to a large faster capacity unit. yes that laptop pc I was referring to is only running in 800x600 on a 10inch screen , however it IS a touch screen which is nice if you hate glidepoint's like me. yes it's 10 years old and only in the past few years have touch screens really caught on. now I think some of the netbooks are using them. if I find the ram cheap enough I would upgrade that too, but how much of a difference will 256mb really make? (768-->1gb)
all in all it's running much better and I consider it usable so thanks guys. this forum was great. in others I got a lot of "get a new one" or "it's too old" and it can't handle that and never will type of thing. additionally I have learned a bit about macs too. one question though; how the hell do you get along with only one mouse button? and WHY???? how hard would it be t add another, lol

[reader50]

About the mouse button - for a long time, Apple stuck with single button mice. Mac OS supports multibutton, and you can create a right-click by holding down the Control key.

Control + left click = rightclick

I went to multi button mice when I started gaming. Single mouse button = get fragged a lot.

[tkmd]

Good job on the powerbook. I still use my Pismo for light web work/ email and thats a G3 chip in it. I still use 1.5 PB for everyday stuff, and I amazed at the great memory management in 10.4- prolly the fastest OS for older laptops.

But every great OS must have bloated partner -> leopard.

I honestly think that MS is finally catching up to that efficiency in windows 2008.

[Big Mac]

I disagree - 10.5 isn't bloated. It may not run as well on older Macs as 10.4, but that doesn't mean it's bloated.

[tkmd]

Originally Posted by Big Mac 

I disagree - 10.5 isn't bloated. It may not run as well on older Macs as 10.4, but that doesn't mean it's bloated.

But that was my point, since 10.1, Mac OS X has gotten faster on every version upgrade- on the same machine! Thats not something you can say about any other OS.

Until they got to 10.5 (leopard). I suspect that Apple knew this also, by releasing snow leopard as a 29$ upgrade that was only focused on performance.

[P]

Maybe not, but 10.4->10.5 is special in the sense that it's the only OS X update that is slower on most hardware. 10.3->10.4 is slower if you don't have enough RAM, but generally the updates have become faster.