Why is my computer so sluggish?
I just picked up a 2003 15" PowerBook G4 for my daughter. It's the 1 ghz model with the original 60 gb hard drive, SuperDrive, and airport extreme. It also has 2 gb of RAM.
Right now it's running 10.5.8 Leopard. This computer is very sluggish. Opening things within the system takes a bit and trying to do simple things such as streaming YouTube is impossible. It won't even play purchased video from iTunes. The only thing that it seems to do smoothly is play music, and it's a very large iPod at this point.
So I'm wondering what my next steps should be. I've tried to reset the NVRAM which hasnt worked. I'm using the command+option+P+R and I only get the chime once and then it boots to the OS. So I'm wondering if the key combo is different for this model.
I wonder if perhaps the 4200 rpm hard drive is the culprit. But you'd think that it should be at least able to play back a basic SD video smoothly. And my ram should be more than enough.
So what should I do now? Reinstall the OS? Try different ram? Replace the hard drive? Your thoughts would be appreciated!
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2 opmerkingen
I think that I somewhat figured it out. I found a setting in iTunes to only play in SD and disable HD. This has cleared up issues in iTunes. I also found several threads about issues with PPC and Flash. I enabled hardware acceleration in Flash settings and this has made the streaming video somewhat watchable. The 1 ghz processor is definitely the issue here though. According to the computer, it jacks up to 80%-90% usage while playing flash. My ram usage only goes up around 25%. So it's likely just the limitations of the older computer. Thanks for the advice!
door Josh
Thanks for posting about the settings you found...that's good info. Also, lowering the screen resolution and color depth can help (although of course doing that is not ideal).
door rdklinc