my sisters imac is soooo slow

[davidwes]

My sister has a imac flat panel g4. 700 mhz and 256 mb of ram. it is running really slow. What tools can I use to help it run faster?
Let me tell you what the activity monitor says :
for cpu:
use it at 9 system is at 4, threads at 94, processes at 36
for system memory:
wired 38.37, active 36.27, inactive 65.91 used 140

there are alot of precess's going too.
I have the kernel task at 31.20mb or real memory
window server at 14.9
activity monitor at 13.25
finer at 2.98
login window at 2.66
at cupsd, system uiserve, atsserver, dock, pm tool, coreservicesd, lookupd, pbs, and more!!! and that's with no programs running.

I know that I need more ram period. But short of that what else can i do?

 

[AJ Muni]

My sister has a imac flat panel g4. 700 mhz and 256 mb of ram. it is running really slow. What tools can I use to help it run faster?
Let me tell you what the activity monitor says :
for cpu:
use it at 9 system is at 4, threads at 94, processes at 36
for system memory:
wired 38.37, active 36.27, inactive 65.91 used 140

there are alot of precess's going too.
I have the kernel task at 31.20mb or real memory
window server at 14.9
activity monitor at 13.25
finer at 2.98
login window at 2.66
at cupsd, system uiserve, atsserver, dock, pm tool, coreservicesd, lookupd, pbs, and more!!! and that's with no programs running.

I know that I need more ram period. But short of that what else can i do?

go here....http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APP...WRYhc1xNKjPQp/0.0.11.1.0.6.23.1.3.1.2.0.0.1.0

 

[ITASOR]

Hmm I see you're somewhat new here...not really. Just a heads up. You better change your sign from Ibook and Imac to iBook and iMac or you'll get yelled at.




About the iMac, did you mention what OS it is running? you definitely need more than 256MB.

 

[Dale Sorel]

Must... buy... more... RAM

 

[macbaseball]

Yeah definitely buy more RAM. Running any operating system on 256 is a joke. Even XP won't run smoothly with 256 MB of RAM (Not that it ever runs smoothly for me).

 

[IJ Reilly]

You don't say if it's always run slowly, or just started running slowly. Big difference! If it's the latter, then start by rebooting, which will delete the virtual memory swap files (the single biggest cause of Mac lag). If that doesn't work, repair permissions (the second biggest cause). If you think it's always been too slow, then upgrading RAM would help.

A G4 iMac can run just fine with 256 Mb. This is how they were configured when they shipped in first place.

 

[Flowbee]

One thing to check is how much free space is left on the hard drive. I have an old Powerbook with a small HD and find that if I get down to less than 1gb free, things come to an absolute crawl.

 

[davidwes]

Okay. I am going to repair permissions. And the rebooting? Do you mean just restart the computer? Like normally?

The computer wasn't always this slow. My sister says it became slower after she installed microsoft office.

She is running 10.3.5

 

[yojitani]

You might try Onyx - this is kind of like Norton System Works, only without messing up your computer.
http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

YOJ

 

[IJ Reilly]

Okay. I am going to repair permissions. And the rebooting? Do you mean just restart the computer? Like normally?

The computer wasn't always this slow. My sister says it became slower after she installed microsoft office.

She is running 10.3.5

Yep, just reboot. Even logging out and logging back in works. OSX builds huge virtual memory swap files on the HD over time, and for reasons that elude me, they are never deleted until you reboot or log out. Essentially, these big VM files lead to more and more HD flogging, which really slows things down, especially when you haven't got a ton of RAM. (The main reason I personally do not automatically recommend an infusion of RAM in these situations is that eventually you'll overrun that RAM too, and the Mac will start to slow down anyway.)

I'd also recommend installing and running AppleJack. I like this maintenance software solution better than some of the others because it runs in single user mode and consequently it will sometimes work even when the Mac is otherwise unbootable.

Don't know about MS Office because I don't use it. As a general rule, I don't trust Microsoft software and try to keep it off my Macs.

 

[wdlove]

She should update to 10.3.9. Otherwise increasing the RAM will produce a noticeable increase in speed.

 

[kalisphoenix]

I dunno about upgrading to 10.3.9. I've had much better luck with 10.3.5...

 

[FF_productions]

even adding another 256 mb's of ram will boost performance, also try to clean up stuff on the hard drive that you don't need..