[Koralatov]

I have a G3 iMac I'm giving to a friend; it's the Blue Dalmatian one in my signature, which contains the pertinent specs. It's only really going to be used for running Mail.app, Safari, Address Book, iPhoto '05, iTunes, Microsoft Word and Powerpoint and Adium. My friend isn't particularly tech-savvy, so I doubt she'd do much else with it.

It's running Tiger, fully updated, and it does so very satisfyingly. I'm sure several of you will recommend I downgrade to Panther, but I think Tiger is the better OS, and as such is staying. I was discussing OSX with a friend, and they said they'd got a noticeable performance boost by disabling background items that weren't used--iSight drivers being the example used.

Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that. Any suggestions? Ideally, if at all possible, I'd like to pare the background items back to only what is needed by the OS to run happily with the above programs. So, OSX experts, how do I do this? You input is much appreciated.

[analogika]

I'm inclined to consider your friend's advice complete hogwash, since the iSight drivers aren't actually loaded until an iSight is connected.

Nor does much of anything else really use any system resources until it's explicitly called.

Stuff eating RAM is an exception - such as Dashboard.

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by analogika 

I'm inclined to consider your friend's advice complete hogwash, since the iSight drivers aren't actually loaded until an iSight is connected.

Being honest, I did wonder about what she was saying; it seemed a bit overkill to load drivers regardless of whether or not you had an iSight connected. Thanks for clearing that up though.

Stuff eating RAM is an exception - such as Dashboard.

Dashboard was the first thing I disabled, mainly because it devours resources and the intended recipient of the machine would never use, and would likely be confused if she ever called it up by accident.

Anything else you'd finger as potential RAM hogs?

[analogika]

if the thing is updated to 10.4.11, the biggest potential hog - Safari - has been fixed, so I'm out of suggestions.

[Koralatov]

Originally Posted by analogika 

if the thing is updated to 10.4.11, the biggest potential hog - Safari - has been fixed, so I'm out of suggestions.

Already done. Thanks for the input--very much appreciated!