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works nicely on G4 also
Authored by: chardinej on Feb 22, '02 04:32:54PM

This is the best set of tips for improving the speed of OS X I have seen.

I tried most of them today on my BW with Sonnet G4/500 Encore upgrade and I can say that they made quite a difference. My hunch is that the Window Compression utility had the most effect followed by using an alternate theme that is opaque (opAqua). I now notice that resizing windows is quite a bit faster when the window is large and even resizing a browser window in IE is reasonable compared to a "pig" before I made the changes.

One thing I did not try is installing the new fonts rom the MS web page. I did turn off font smoothing in Tinkertool and found that is took so much away from the user experience that I put it right back.

One thing I wondered is why no mention was made of the utility that eliminates the shadows in Aqua. I would have thought that this would have made an improvement in speed also.



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WindowShadeX controls shadows
Authored by: noivad on Jun 15, '02 12:06:49PM

Hi,
He did cover shadows, but instead of recommending the hack available, he mentions the theme, which I think could be more trouble than it's worth. Alrady I found that I can't use the recommend theme, because duality is refusing to recognize it as a valid theme. So, I looked online for a less intrusive one, but most are flashier, so they more than likely take up more processing power.

Besides, you can easily work around the this sugestion by just using WindowShade X, because it also controls transparent shadows for both the active and inactive windows. I set my inactive windows to have virtually no shadow, figuring the less area to compute shadows for the better, without completely destroying the nice look of them.And I turned down the active windows a bit.

I've done almost all the other upgrades so far but some require my to restart my system, which I haven't done yet. I'm leaving Text smoothing as well, since such a beautiful thing about X is never having to see jaggy fonts again. With it off I can feel the snappiness, of newly launched apps.So I think I'll use tinker tool and compromise and set it to not smooth anything under 9 pts.

Also, I can't replace the fonts until nothing is using them as well.

Also the poster whole mention the top command (open a terminal window and type "top") was dead on. I use it all the time to evaluate products. The better programmers are considerate and let their processes sleep when they aren't doing anything, while the lazier ones use more processing time than they really need to.


I notice that MS IE is a major hog (around 20% idle), just as it is in OS 9.x and before. (Also, IE downloads slow to a crawl if you decide to work on another task, which show the inefficiency of the program). I'm using OmniWeb 4.1b for everything but the few sites that don't yet work with it for those and other reasons.

Entourage is a bit less of a hog, you can leave the windows open and it'll bounce between .7 to 3.5% (coinicidentally enough it decided to crash for no reason as I wrote this). I'm using an iceBook [sic] 500Mhz.
Other numbers from top: Palm desktop never sleeps since it's waiting for a sync, and uses between 1% and 5%. Net monitor uses about 2%-5% whether the network connection is active or idle. Windowshade X, mention above sleeps. Someone mentioned ICQ or AOL's IM clients. All the official client for IM are incredible hogs, using between 16%-30% when idle because they're always waiting for data (I haven't checked in hiding or minimizing affects these numbers). Meanwhile, Fire .31b (which handles all IM protocols) is much more efficient, using only .7% with all windows minimized or hidden, and only between .7% and 1.5 percent with them open. (On a related note, networking applications that are hogs induce noticeable latency in other, network apps, which is very noticeable (and sometime fatal in games like Clan Lord) on slower G3 systems.

Hope this helps.

M



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WindowShadeX controls shadows
Authored by: Billie37 on Dec 19, '02 02:38:25PM

You mention just what I have been wondering about.

I'm on an iBook with 384MB (soon to b3 maxed out). And I am, admittedly, overly conscious of RAM / CPU usage.

Is it possible to stop Palm from waiting on a HotSync?

I've tried asking them (also asking them to actually update Palm software for 10.2).

Anyway, thanks for your post, It's nice to hear that what I see in Terminal is common.
-Bill



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