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Need help with speeding up my Mac OS X...?
i have an old imac with OS X version 10.4.11. i am not sure what year it is, but it has to be at least five years old. it runs very slow. i have already erased the hard drive and reinstalled the OS, but it continues to run very slowly. i do plan on getting a new computer, but in the meantime, i have to deal with this one. does anyone know what i can do to make it run faster? it has an additional ram card already in it. maybe a program or something that i can download?
here is some more information about my computer, if it helps:
hard drive: capacity, 19.0 GB, (12.95 GB available).
450 Mhz PowerPC G3 processor
memory: 320 MB SDRAM
Answer
Everyone knows what it means if we say "My car runs slowly," but there is no commonly agreed idea for what it means for a computer to run slowly. Even if we consider the various ways a computer will "run slowly", we have no free solution. The processor is the main drag on this 10 year old computer. You can add some speed, but not by downloading any magic software. The solution will cost big, green, bucks. In this case, there absolutely is no free lunch.
* Slow Internet: If you are using a dial-up connection, change to ADSL / cable modem ("broadband").
* Sow to open applications, save documents, apply filters in Photoshop, slow using three or four applications at once: add more RAM. This iMac has two RAM slots. Remove the smaller of the two RAM sticks and replace it with a 512MB stick. Type is PC-100, old but commonly available. OS 10.4.11 itself uses 256MB of your RAM. That doesn't leave much for anything else. I have several Macs, and one is a 450MHz G4 running OS 10.4.11 with 1GB of RAM and it isn't painfully slow.
* Slow to startup: no solution. This is mostly processor related. It shouldn't break your heart that your old box takes 90 seconds to startup.
Other Answer
Yeah it runs slow, no you cannot speed it up. I did not know 10.4 could run on a machine with specs that low.
That must be one old mac. 450 Mhz is extraordinarily slow. A modern mac is up to 2.6 Ghz. Same with the ram, most macs have 4 to 8 gigs of ram.
It runs slow because of the hardware, and there nothing you can do about that except get a new computer.
