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Apr 16th, 2006
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Making Tiger lighter for a G3

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Hi everyone

I own an iBook G3 500MHz and have recently installed Tiger on it. It runs very slowly and I would like to know if there are ways to make the operating system less resources hungry.

Are there ways to turn off certain services/programs that run automatically that aren't necessary and cause a load on the system? Is it possible to make the system less of an "eye candy" to lower the load on the GPU/Memory/CPU?

In addition to that, I would like to know if there's a way to make Tiger occupy less disk space. I only have 10GB of disk space on this iBook, so every bit is important... There is a program called "Delocalizer" that erases the additional languages installed, but its support goes only up to Jaguar.

Any small relief to my tiny little iBook would be a great improvement...

Thanks a lot!
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Gantlett is offline Offline
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Apr 17th, 2006
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Re: Making Tiger lighter for a G3

Unfortunately, most of the speed issues you're seeing is in the RAM requirements and the kernel. There's really not much you can do to streamline it without hacking and recompiling the kernel.

As for removing language options, look for Monolingual. It does the same thing and is Tiger-aware.
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yellow is offline Offline
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Apr 18th, 2006
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Re: Making Tiger lighter for a G3

Thanks for the great link! :p I'll try it today.

My iBook has 384MB of RAM, it's not a lot, but it's not bad either (I think...).

BTW, yesterday I found this cool app - it seems to turn off a few things that may increase performance/free up RAM.

Does anyone else have another idea/tip?

Thanks everyone
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Gantlett is offline Offline
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Apr 18th, 2006
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Re: Making Tiger lighter for a G3

That's not enough RAM at all. And that's part of the reason Tiger is so slow. It's SUPER RAM hungry. You would be best advised to Max out the RAM and you'll see a huge difference.

BE careful with Tinkertool.
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yellow is offline Offline
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May 16th, 2006
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Re: Making Tiger lighter for a G3
Hi guys

Yesterday I tried playing a DIVX video file through VLC Player on my little iBook... Don't ask... It barely kept a decent frame rate and after a few seconds it just stopped...

Is this machine totally incapable of playing videos? Is there anything that can be done to slim down the OS so that only crucial processes run? Maybe there's a way to remove components of the OS? It is possible in Windows XP, it must be possible in MacOS!

Yellow, I don't want to invest money in this machine, but do you honestly think that adding more ram would help the iBook play videos properly?

Thanks...
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Gantlett is offline Offline
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May 17th, 2006
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Re: Making Tiger lighter for a G3

You can try lowering the resolution on the screen to 640x480 before opening the video file. The screen will be fuzzier, but the video file shouldn't be. Then just set the resolution back to 1024x768 after the video.

That trick may help out a bit.
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gortonsfi is offline Offline
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May 17th, 2006
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Re: Making Tiger lighter for a G3

I wanted to try out that VLC program you mentioned, I found MPlayer OSX ran a little bit lighter than VLC on my machine (12" Powerbook 1.5GHz 10.4.6 512RAM)
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gortonsfi is offline Offline
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May 17th, 2006
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Re: Making Tiger lighter for a G3

Thanks for the tip
I'll give it a try later today, although I'm quite skeptic... :rolleyes:

BTW: I tried it now on my dual 1.8 G5 at work, and both applications seemed to perform the same. But, maybe the slight performance difference will mean much to my little G3...
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May 17th, 2006
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Re: Making Tiger lighter for a G3

Quote originally posted by Gantlett ...
Yellow, I don't want to invest money in this machine, but do you honestly think that adding more ram would help the iBook play videos properly?.
Tiger is a VERY processor intensive OS. And that means it'll run slowly on the G3. And 512MB of RAM is really the decent minimum to run Tiger. Unfortunately, you're running well below that, which means the OS has to use swap constantly, and you have a slow HD in your iBook (4200RPM most likely), which further slows everything down.

More RAM will make a big difference to repsone, uptime, and speed of opening applicaitons, but ultimately your speed issues are all in the slowness of the G3 processor and the massive overhead that Tiger requires.

And again.. no, you cannot strip down OS X. Unlike Windows XP, OS X doesn't have services turned on that you don't need. So there's nothing to strip down for speed.
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yellow is offline Offline
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May 17th, 2006
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Re: Making Tiger lighter for a G3

Well, this sucks.

Is there an alternative OS that takes a smaller CPU toll? One that supports AirPort and has Video playback applications?

If not -
How much do you think I could sell it for? It's still capable of web surfing, playing back music, word processing, etc...
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This thread is more than three months old

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