[wednesday]

First of all let me say I am not really a hardware person. I'm a graphic/web design & development person and when I went to college my program used Macs and I came to love them, so once I was out working on my own I got my own Powerbook. The one I have is a 15" PB purchased in August 2003. I have noticed that it seems slower than it used to -- even if I have every application except the one I'm using closed -- and also the fan seems to run ALL the time, which is kind of annoying.

I almost always have it asleep or turned off at night, but I manually run the sudo periodic scripts now and then -- don't see that it makes any difference really. I have no idea what else can be done to optimize a PB that has grown sluggish...any ideas?

I don't use the PB for anything terribly memory-intensive. A little photoshop and illustrator now and then for freelance projects, but honestly it's mostly an email/internet machine for me. No video or gaming apps at all, unless you count the rare one- or two-minute clip in iVideo.

TIA!

[ibook_steve]

How much memory do you have installed? How much free space is on your hard disk? When was the last time you rebooted? Have you tried running from a test user account? At the extreme, have you tried doing a clean install of the OS, bringing over all your settings? What about its operation seems sluggish?

Steve

[wednesday]

How much memory do you have installed?

About this Mac says:
Processor: 1 GHz PowerPC G4, 1 MB L3 cache
Memory: 1GB SDRAM

How much free space is on your hard disk?

Hard drive says I have about 32 GB available out of about 55 GB total capacity.

When was the last time you rebooted?

I reboot maybe once a week or so -- it does seem to help, but not for very long.

Have you tried running from a test user account?

No -- I know how to set one up but I guess I don't know why I would do it.

At the extreme, have you tried doing a clean install of the OS, bringing over all your settings?

That's a bit beyond me, to tell you the truth...although I did upgrade the OS to 10.4 recently, but I didn't see that make any difference one way or another.

What about its operation seems sluggish?

Mostly just programs taking a long time to open or close, or to switch between programs (like say switching between Safari and Thunderbird).

[mattcass]

I'm in the same boat as you wednesday. My 1GHz Powerbook 768 MB RAM is finally starting to show it's age. I'm currently working on a large document in Pages and nearly every single click or letter typed brings the spinning beach ball into action.

Aside from buying more RAM or upgrading the hard drive I don't think there's anything to be done that isn't a major upgrade. How much difference those two upgrades will make I dont know. Our computers are 3 years old after-all, which seems to be the typical life-span of computer's these days.

For now I just run Cocktail every once in a while and break up my large files into two separate files if possible. Just so the system doesn't get weighed down with a single giant file.

I was really hoping to get 4-5 years of useful life out of my Mac. It could be turned into a music-only laptop soon...

[alphasubzero949]

First off, download Anacron which will automagically take care of the periodic tasks.

If the system is sluggish, first try the likes of AppleJack and run it in SUM on autopilot. If that doesn't take care of things, your directory structure could be fragmented. In that case you'll need DiskWarrior to check for damage to or fragmentation with the HFS+ structure.