10.5: A cautionary tale on overloaded Desktops in 10.5

Jan 17, '08 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Anonymous

This is not a hint per se, more of a cautionary tale, but I figured it might be useful to somebody out there. A few weeks ago, I updated my wife's copmuter to Leopard. It's a 1.4GHz PowerBook; certainly not the fastest machine around, but should keep her company another couple of years.

When it came up after the first reboot, it was slow. Incredibly slow. It was unusable. Whenever I switched to the Finder, I'd get the spinning beachball, and then everything ground to a halt. I reinstalled -- same problem. Then I had an inspiration: my wife is hopeless with keeping order on her computer. All files that she uses, downloads, gets sent via mail, etc. end up on her desktop -- and there were more than 600 of them there at the moment.

In Tiger, this was merely an aesthetic problem. In Leopard however, the live preview feature means that the computer has to generate a preview for every file. And since the Desktop is visible whenever you look at a Finder window, the Finder had to use a huge amout of processing power to generate 600 previews ... which basically rendered it unusable. So I simply switched to the Terminal and issued this command:

mv ~/Desktop/* ~/Downloads/
That moved all files from the Desktop to the new Downloads folder. After that, the computer immediately became responsive again, and our marriage was saved!

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