A while back I had to choose between a new computer and serious medical issues.... I thought I hit the new computer key... me and typos... my word, what a time to make one.

Anyway, I'm having to make due with this old G4 Mirrored Front for now: 2GB memory, OSX 10.5.7 and the older than dirt 1.25 GHz. I have noticed the even further slow down when I went from 10.4 to 10.5. I upgraded to 10.5 for the back up features as I am older than dirt too. I thought about going back to 10.4 on one hard drive and leaving the newer on another. (Kind of a manual back up when I remember to do so). Any ideas to help it just a little bit? (I did the cleaning, bought new hard drive, tossed add ons, nothing but reinstalled apps and the system on the start up drive, less than 50% on the drive in use, etc).

Thanks
midalmata
(My Dalmatian in Spanish)

midalmata,
Just use mine for a while and you will think yours is fast.
1 GHz G4, 640 MB sdram, then compound that with Hughesnet for an internet connection.

Hi, and welcome to FineTunedMac.

Sorry, but I can't offer any suggestions; you seem to have taken care of things pretty well on your own. (It sounds like your Mac really needs to change its spots.)

(May I suggest that you change your sig to *not* include your e-mail address?

1. Direct e-mail responses to posters are discouraged, because the knowledge included therein is not "on-camera" for the rest of the FTM community to read.

2. The spam-bots will getcha!)

I'm not quite getting this detail from your post: do you have one of the drives plugged in via USB? The external USB ports on that machine are v1 and are extremely slow. Another fishing expedition: do you have the drive(s) journaled? That could also slow things down. I had a G4 tower for many moons. It just wouldn't quit!

Can you describe what kind slow down are you seeing. What kind of hard drives are you using? Did you perhaps install your startup on a slower speed hard drive. We might be able to help more if we have more information.

I had a MDD for some time, and it was/is a good rugged Mac. It is particularly noteworthy in having three separate ATA buses and three separate drive bays, the default bus for the boot drive is the 100 GHz bus that serves the drive bay near the power supply at the back of the chassis. The 66 GHz bus drive bay is located below the optical drive bays and forward of the 100 GHz bus drive bay. The optical drive bay is located at the top front and served by the third ATA bus which is 33GHz.

Logic and common sense would seem to indicate putting both the first and second internal drives in the faster 100 GHz drive bay, but logic and common sense are, in this case, wrong. Drive system performance is optimized by placing one drive, usually the normal boot drive, in the 100GHz bus drive bay and the other in the 66GHz drive bay. The secret is minimizing contention on either bus improves disk I/O speed noticeably. At least it did on my MDD. On this model Mac you should also configure the ATA drives as "bus configured" rather than master/slave. I don't know that improves performance, but it definitely improves reliability.

You have maxed out the RAM on the MDD so about the only other major speed improvement you could make would be an upgraded CPU, but those are getting hard to find. I just went to my favorite source and they no longer list upgrade CPUs on their web site.

For the price of a CPU upgrade (if you can find one for the MDD) you could buy a Mac MIni and have a faster computer than that old G4 could ever be.

You didn't mention whether your MDD 1.25Ghz was the dual processor one or the single, but I'll assume it's single.

Thanks for the confirmation of Leopard 10.5 running slower than Tiger 10.4 on your setup, as I have the dual processor model of the MDD as well. I've heard conflicting opinions and reports about the speed of 10.5 vs. 10.4 on the G4 class Macs, and I've been hesitant to upgrade for fear of slowing it down. I still find mine to be plenty zippy with 10.4 installed, so I definitely don't want to go slower.

As for speeding yours up, it sounds like you've done quite a bit already and have taken some necessary steps.