iMac G5 1.9 PPC iSight

[jb]

iMac G5 PPC 1.9 GHz iSight, OS 10.4.11, 250GB HD of which 145 GB is used, 512KB of RAM.

My friend’s G5 was going fine until about 1 month ago when it became as slow as molasses.
He uses his computer to do
- emails
- Banking (pay bills)
- Google searches
- Investments follow ups

I don’t know what he did or did not do. Probably nothing as he is not too computer savvy.
But then we've all done something unknowingly we should not have done, have we not? One thing certain he
did not do any new software install. All we (meaning me) did, was to reinstall his ABDialer,
a telephone dialing software. We had not noticed any slower performance at that time.

We tried everything,
- Repair permissions (3-4 times)
- Repair Disk (2 times)
- Ran Diskwarrior (2 times)

All to no avail. What is one to do? Would a Reinstall help? But then how does one protect the data?
He does not have a Backup disc. I suppose I could loan him one of my discs to do the backup
before the Reinstall.

Any suggestions would, (no, not would, but will) help I’m certain.

jb

PS. My new iMac, Intel i3, 3.06GH, 21.5", OS 10.6.4, is going strong, though not that much faster than my previous iMac G5 PPC 1.8 GH. I suppose it would be faster if I did any Photoshop manipulations or such.

[kbeartx]

My first thought is the comp is light on RAM [512K? .5 MB is insufficient for a modern OS, IMO] but that's not been changed recently....

Kb

[Xairbusdriver]

Take a look at Activity Monitor and sort by %CPU (just click on the column label). That should show whatever is taking up the CPU's cycles at the top of the list (if it starts with zero%, click the label again to sort by high to low). Please report back with the top five CPU users.

With only 512MB of RAM, the disk is probably very active with virtual memory tasks. I assume Panther did that trick with the disk, but it has improved with each new version of the OS. At any rate, the disk could be highly fragmented by now, OS X capabilities or no. The major problem could be so few large, contiguous sectors requiring an extreme amount of head travel. And, speaking from very recent experience, I would not trust the drive too much longer, anyway. And there should absolutely, positively be a back drive connected and use religiously at least once a day! I'm guessing that drive is ~five years old? "It's not a matter of if, it's only a matter of when."

[gunug]

We still have 50-60 of the 17" model with the iSight and they're in labs with Powermac G5 Dual processor machines and they're no where near as speedy as the towers.  We took all of ours up to a Gig and half (I'm pretty sure) because they had to run CS3 and 10.5 OS.  So the memory comments are spot on as far as I'm concerned.  I've rebuilt a slow machine with Diskwarrior and had a lot better performance so it that didn't help then you could look at caches and things that you can fix with Applejack or Onyx.  Let us know how this shakes out!

[jb]

Thanks all. Have ordered a 2 GB memory. Should install it next week. Will keep you posted with the results.

jb

[Highmac]

Wasn't there something with the older PPCs that they needed to be left on overnight every so often to carry out background maintenance? If that machine is shut down every night it would not have been running the necessary procedures.

And if I'm talking rubbish, please don't shout too loudly.....

[jchuzi]

The nightly maintenance routine is a function of the OS version, not necessarily PPC vs. Intel. You can run those routines manually with the appropriate version of Cocktail or OnyX. Or, you can do it via Terminal:

sudo periodic daily weekly monthly

[krissel]

Backup now!  At the very least, clone the drive to an external. If the new RAM doesn't seem to help, boot from the external drive and see if it runs better. If so, the original drive may be failing. A pending bad sector can slow down a machine.

You might give this a try on the original disk (after your friend does a backup!).

http://www.volitans-software.com/smart_utility.php