Making Tiger lighter for a G3

[Gantlett]

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!

[yellow]

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.

[Gantlett]

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 ;)

[yellow]

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.

[Gantlett]

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! :sad:

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...

[gortonsfi]

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.

[gortonsfi]

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)

[Gantlett]

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...

[yellow]

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.

[Gantlett]

Well, this sucks. :sad:

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... :?:

[yellow]

I would say that Panther would be a better solution for you and your iBook. I have no idea what it's worth or what you could get for it. Check on eBay for comparision ideas.

[Gantlett]

Well, as it turns out, me and my girl friend (future wife :cheesy: ) have our birthdays next week (we're one week apart :) ), so our families are gonna buy us a nice DVD player and that's it...

I'll try to sell my girlfriend's useless iBook... I'm not hoping for much... Since I can't hold an eBay account because I'm not a US citizen, I can't sell it there. If anyone could say how much they would be willing to pay for such a computer, considering it can surf the web wirelessly, compose documents and pretty much do everything except for playing back video or editing audio and video, it would help me quite a bit actually. I just need to get an estimate of how much I could ask for it.

Thanks guys.

[yellow]

You can look on ebay however for an idea of what similar systems are being sold for..

[kc0arf]

Hello,

If you are interested in exploring a bit, you could try installing linux onto the computer. Not sure if it will support the wireless cards or not, but it may give you something to work with, and you could learn a few things from it.

Check out Fedora for PPC, and Yellow Dog Linux.

I have run YDL on my Powerbook G3 (333) and it was noticably faster than OS X on the computer. I to also agree that more RAM is required. Plus, the iBook has a slower internal motherboard / components, so you are working with those issues against you. The iBook was not engineered for heavy-duty processing that you are looking for.

Christian