Hardware wise you look like you got to the end of the line. I don't
think a faster video card would do much of a difference (although a
R9800 is nice to have), and although more RAM is better you seem to
have already a fair bit of it (anything over 1GB unless you do video
editing should be enough). To choke my QS I need to open Photoshop,
Safari, Mail, Word, Quicktime and maybe 1 or 2 more small apps and I
have less RAM (768MB).
Recently someone was saying on the list that SATA drives shouldn't show
much of an improvement (I bought mine SATA anyway so I could donate
them to a G5 when I decide to migrate, yes intel is a few years away
for me;-).
Buying an even faster CPU is probably a waste of money at this point
So I guess it is time for you to go to a G5, the faster bus and memory
access should go a long way to make the machine feel more responsive.
And I notice that the earlier models (1.6 to 2GHz) start to pop up on
eBay at reasonable prices. Moreover your upgraded system should fetch
well on the second hand market.
Someone on the list with experience on a G5 might be able to tell you
what kind of speed improvement you should expect.
OTOH, there is the software and maintenance side of it. One key thing
for OSX to perform acceptably is to leave A LOT of free space on the
system drive for virtual memory. If the drive is rather full (3/4 or
more on an 80GB drive partition) things tend to slow down dramatically.
Repairing permissions regularly and being up to date with the system
seems to help me to keep it reasonably speedy for my use. I do however
have 10.3.9, and no experience with Tiger and as I am afraid it will
break compatibility with some software I have, and as long as Apple
keeps fully supporting Panther, I do not see a reason to upgrade.
HTH
Cheers
Andrea
On 15/01/2006, at 1:04 AM, Roland Drake wrote:
Dear G-List:
I have a Power Mac G4 466 which has been extensively upgraded. It now
contains a Sonnet 1.25 GHz Dual Processor, a
Pioneer DVD Superdrive, a Radeon 9000 64MB graphics card, six ATA
drives (varying in size from 120 GB to 160 GB), a
Sonnet Tempo ATA-133 Controller card, OS 10.4.2, and 896MB RAM. One of
these drives is dedicated strictly to the OS
and my programs. Other files are stored on the other drives in this
configuration. Overall the machine is solid, but I
have noticed that it is on the sluggish side, especially when
accessing files or launching programs. I am trying to figure
out options for increasing this old Mac's overall performance as much
as possible. Any suggestions would be
appreciated.
Roland :)
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