Speed up my G4 browsing

June 16, 2009 1:16 PM

Why is my iBook G4 so painfully crappy at browsing the net, and can I make it better?

I have a iBook G4 (1.2Ghz, 768Mb RAM, Mac OS X 10.5.6)

I keep it around purely for browsing the net without having to boot up my desktop. It's great on most sites, but anything with flash video on it and the performance goes down the pan. YouTube videos drop to 1fps, scrolling goes all laggy, and sometimes the HDD seems to go nuts and make everything even worse for 10min or so - and Ive no idea why.

How can I make improve this? I browse with FireFox and I don't want to switch browsers if I can help it as I have synced bookmarks and things like Adblock.

posted by lemonfridge to computers & internet (15 comments total)

Flash is the killer. Apparently Adobe knows about it. We'll see; it drives me nuts too.

Meanwhile, try avoiding Flash-containing pages? Maybe add a Flash blocker to Firefox?
posted by ZakDaddy at 1:22 PM on June 16 [2 favorites has favorites]

Well, I had an ibook g4 1.2 ghz. When I was using OSX v10.4 it was speedy and did websurfing quite well. When I upgraded to 10.5.6 the system slowed down drastically. I chose to get a Macbook Pro, problem solved. Don't know if that observation is of any use to you, but there it is.
posted by Antidisestablishmentarianist at 1:27 PM on June 16

768Mb of RAM seems like not very much for browsing flash-heavy sites. Then again, I upgraded my iBook G4 to 2G of RAM (or whatever the max is it will hold) and it still has problems: lag, skippy videos, spinning beach ball, HDD going nuts for no reason, CPU gets hot and fan kicks on, etc. Not sure there is much to do beyond avoiding flash sites. I'd also close/restart Firefox if you don't do so regularly as I find its CPU usage can really creep up over time, especially if you have a lot of tabs open.
posted by misskaz at 1:31 PM on June 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

Safari has a somewhat smaller footprint than FF, but yeah, your CPU is the real bottleneck here, not to mention the fact that the Mac version of Flash is pretty slow to begin with. A cheap netbook with XP might be your best bet for cheap couch surfing.
posted by Oktober at 1:36 PM on June 16

I have a G4 iBook as well (800 Mhz, 256 MB RAM, Mac OS 10.3.9) and the Flash performance is abysmal. This add-on will relieve your computer of some of the strain.
posted by Houyhnhnm at 1:41 PM on June 16 [2 favorites has favorites]

If you care about speed, I'd probably run Safari 4 on it instead of Firefox.
posted by floam at 1:47 PM on June 16

Sorry, missed your part about not wanting to switch. If it makes things any easier, there's SafariBlock, which pulls down the adblock feeds and works pretty good.

Also, you'd probably like ClickToFlash once you switched.
posted by floam at 1:49 PM on June 16

My daily-driver is an iBook G4 1.2GHz with 1.2Gb of RAM. I would recommend upgrading your memory to the maximum it can take.

I also recently had problems with speed and my brother advised me to ditch 10.5 and go back to 10.4. 10.4 as well as Safari 4 are a vast improvement in usability on the modern web, though Firefox is good too on 10.4
posted by cmetom at 1:52 PM on June 16

Upgrade your memory. Seriously.
posted by SansPoint at 3:00 PM on June 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

ClicktoFlash will help a lot. I use it on my 2.6Ghz MBP simply because occasionally sites with flash give me the beach ball while trying to load.
posted by Fleebnork at 3:06 PM on June 16

I'll sort some more memory out ASAP.

Any idea why the HDD goes nuts and slows everything down? Spotlight has been told to only index applications, yet the drive grinds away for 10min+ (rendering the laptop almost unusable during this period).
posted by lemonfridge at 3:23 PM on June 16

The grinding is likely the system swapping the contents of ram to and from the disk. When your ram is depleted and the system has too much to remember, it puts the stuff at the end of the line on disk. If you have a lot going on at once, this causes tons of stuff to go back and forth to disk. Disks are very much slower than ram so the whole system practically grinds to a halt. buy ram and go to 10.4 seems like your best option.
posted by Antidisestablishmentarianist at 3:38 PM on June 16 [1 favorite has favorites]

I have a Mac Mini G4 with slightly better specs - 1.42 Ghz chip and 1Gb of RAM (OS 10.4 though). Was having similar problems, after Googling realized that Flash 10 was part of the problem. Downgraded to Flash 9 and choppiness went away.
posted by javelina at 9:57 PM on June 16

Had a similar problem when I upgraded OS X from tiger to leopard on an old macbook. Browsing was way too slow, so I had to 'solve' the problem by maxing out the RAM to 2gig. I am hoping snow leopard will be faster than leopard, but we'll see.
posted by theyexpectresults at 10:04 AM on June 18

Upgrading to Leopard or Snow Leopard isn't an option for those of us with iBooks, 'cause we're on the old Power PC chips and Leopard only runs on the Intel chips. Even with Tiger and 2G of RAM my iBook chugs.
posted by misskaz at 10:52 AM on June 18