How to increase the performance of my aging Powerbook?

April 6, 2008 9:37 PM

I have a 1.25 GHz Powerbook G4 that has been running sluggish recently. Any tips for increasing performance with what I've got at hand?

I installed Leopard 10.5.2 a few weeks ago. Seems to work fine. I liked the idea of Time Machine so I went out and bought an external hard drive to back things up on. Don't know that it matters but the internal hard drive had about 9 GB of free space remaining. Now what? Would a clean install of Leopard make a difference? Any and all advice would be appreciated but please, try and keep it simple for me....I love technology but we don't always speak the same language. Thanks for taking the time to help me.

posted by hangingbyathread to computers & internet (7 comments total)

You can run some diagnostics, cleanup, and repairs with OnyX.

Your internal HD has 9 GB out of how much total? As a general rule of thumb, it is good to try to aim for about 10% of your HD to be free.

When you installed Leopard, did you do an upgrade then? If you did an upgrade, then it might actually be beneficial to do an Archive & Install (making sure to check the box to preserve Users and Network settings). This has the effect of creating a fresh new Leopard installation, without actually wiping any of your content and settings. Sometimes the "upgrade" option doesn't work so hot, so I always do the latter method.
posted by kosmonaut at 9:50 PM on April 6, 2008

Go back to 10.4.11, unless there's a feature you need from Leopard. It will run faster with the older operating system — Apple is doing more performance improvements for Intel hardware.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 9:59 PM on April 6, 2008

Check your Login Items in the Accounts preference pane, and delete anything that you don't use or need. Fire up Activity Monitor during sluggish periods and see what's listed.

(I've found Leopard to be pretty snappy on my 1GHz iBook.)
posted by holgate at 10:25 PM on April 6, 2008

>Any tips for increasing performance with what I've got at hand?

You mention nothing about RAM - which is generally the cheapest performance-booster you can get. So, if you're not maxed out, get maxed out.
posted by pompomtom at 10:26 PM on April 6, 2008

Yeah, if you have anything less than 2GB of RAM you'll probably notice a huge improvement in performance from a memory upgrade.
posted by malevolent at 11:52 PM on April 6, 2008

@kosmonaut-Thanks for the tip about OnyX. I installed and ran it last night so we'll wait and see.
@Blazecock Pileon-I like Time Machine because I'm not a habitual file backer and the machine was running at about the same speed before installing Leopard. I'll keep it in mind though.
@More RAM- I just installed 1GB that I bought from iFixit (which I recommend, BTW) and don't really have the money for another 1GB right now but am saving for it.

Thanks to all.
posted by hangingbyathread at 10:04 AM on April 7, 2008

You wouldn't happen to be running Growl Safari, would you? Because it brought my G4 Powerbook to its knees, but it took me a while to discover it as the source of my woe. It really didn't play well with Safari 3.
posted by mumkin at 12:20 AM on April 8, 2008