On Tuesday, June 10, 2003, at 10:24 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
In a message dated Saturday, June 07, 2003 8:26 PM, Kevin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
I just bought a PowerBook 520c. It is running OS 8.0 and has 16 Mb of
RAM. It also has RAM doubler 2 installed. I just installed IE 5.1 to use
with my DSL.
I did a little web surfing and found it to be painfully slow. I even
turned off all of the web content graphics. Still slow.
What can I do to speed this thing up without throwing a lot of money
into it? I would like to use it for occasional web surfing and e-mail.
Also for working with Office 98.
Thanks
Kevin >>
Hi Kevin,
These powerbooks will actually run from System 7.1.x to OS 8.1. The system
you're running now, 8.0 suffers from bugs fixed in 8.1, so firstly backup your
drive and update your OS to 8.1 (the Office 98 CD has this updates and other OS
updates included). If you have access to a removable boot-up source, hard
drive, zip drive or the like, you may want to try 7.5.3 or 7.1.x with all of th
eir updates to see if you like their speed increase (if you need links for more
on this, email me).
7.1.x, 7.5.3 and 8.1 are all nice and have their pros and cons. For OS 8.1,
what you will benefit most from is as much ram as can be installed on it. Then,
if it's possible and reasonable to do so, a bigger and faster hard drive is a
great booster. These two will assist in the speedup your looking for. Also
ensure that you have Appletalk off if your not on a network, it wastes extra ram
space and can slow things down down. Extra extensions and installed fonts can
also slow things up.
As far as browsers, the most up-to-date browser for this powerbook is iCab
and disabling images will definitely speed it up. Opera is yet to deliver it's
non-PowerPC version, so don't hold your breath on it. Other browser tricks
include setting up a ram disk and telling your browser to use it as it's web
cache. I'm not sure if this powerbook could be installed more ram than the OS can
use and have a 3rd party ram disk application use that as a ram disk ...
Lastly, Microsoft's last version of Office that run on this powerbook is
4.2.1; 98 is PowerPC-only. Fortunately, they do have downloadable updates to
import newer Word and Excel files (I only use Word on my older Macs, so I only know
those updates). You can even use these updates on Word 5, which is faster on
the 520, and has less fancy features.
Hope that helps! Craig
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