My system became slower and slower and bringing up the font menu in Cocoa apps was very slow - taking between 5 and 10 minutes (beachball-cursor, even the dock was incredibly slow).
I checked out the font directories but couldn't find anything strange. So I copied all the fonts from my user's font folder (~/Library/Fonts) to a new folder, restarted my machine, copied all the fonts back and restarted one more time (not sure if the restarts were necessary). After this, my machine works fine as before.
[Editor's note: I have no way of really testing this myself, so it's published here as a possible troubleshooting tip for those that may be experiencing slowdowns in OS X.]
If you have the Apple Pro keyboard, you can launch (or bring to the foreground) the System Preferences application by holding down the option (alt) key and hitting the mute key twice.
I noticed last night that my desktop machine had "Customize", "Gear", "Connectivity', "Nuts and Bolts" and "Misc" in place of the normal names within the System Preferences window. The normal names are "Personal", "Hardware", "Internet & Network", "System", and "Other". I'm not sure how these were changed on my machine; I honestly do not recall doing it myself (and I searched the site for a hint about renaming system prefs and came up blank). Perhaps some third-party preference panel that I installed and removed changed them at some point. If you have some idea of what might have changed this, let me know (out of curiousity more than anything else).
In any event, noticing that they differed from the official names as seen on my iBook, I set out in search of what was controlling the names and discovered that they are relatively easy to change.
I created a one-second movie using the QuickTime 'DVCPRO-PAL' Apple codec. If you attempt to play it with QT Player 5.0.2, you should get the standard, "QuickTime does not have the necessary software . . . " message. Then QT Updater should launch and download the new 'QuickTime JPEG Update' and 'QuickTime DV Update' extensions.
This should work for both Classic and OS X. Just play the movie with each version of QuickTime Player. In Classic, these will appear as extensions in the System Folder -> Extensions -> QuickTime Extensions folder.
This seems to be the only change in QT 5.0.4. These are the same components included on the new FinalCut Pro 3.0 installer CD.
[Editor's note: It appears this movie has been pulled from the referenced webpage. I'm leaving the article here as some of the discussion below contains useful information.]
I upgraded my original beige G3 desktop with a 466MHz G3, an ATI 128 Rage Pro, and a Apple DVD internal drive over the years. These upgrades have worked fairly well, but I have alway been disappointed that DVD movie playback has never worked. When the DVD Player 3.0.1 update came out for 10.1, I was hopeful that my beige G3 would finally play DVDs since my mac now has almost the same spec as a B&W. But unfortunately the installer wouldn't recognize my mac.
This morning I saw the hint for "Pacifist" (an OS X version of "Tome Viewer"), and thought I'd give it another crack.
It worked beautifully. For the first time I am enjoying DVDs on me beige G3. Just download "Pacifist" and the Apple DVD 3.0.1 update. Use Pacifist to install the update and the balcony is open!
James
PS: I guessing that the update doesn't use the hardware decoding card on B&W G3s since my ATI card doesn't have one.
Long story - Printing with Tektronix (Xerox) 840 color printer. Areas of the page that should be white (clear) were coming out pale yellow. Besides being annoying, it was using a tremendous amount of ink.
After multiple calls to Apple (results were "Duh?") I managed to get to a very intelligent and helpful Xerox technician. He used Macs, and to make a long story short - remembered this problem from NeXt days - seems that Apple just used the old NeXt print code. This code messed with the printer "white point".
At any rate - Xerox created and sent me a new rom for the printer overnight that fixed the problem. If any of you have this problem, just let Xerox know and they'll take prompt care of it.
By default the login window retains the name of the last person to log in. This annoys me, since I usually have to erase someone else's name when I go to log in. To make the login window not display this information, do the following:
Edit the file /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist. You'll need to be have root privileges, so you'll most likely want to open the terminal and sudo pico /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist. Add the following two lines right after the <dict> tag:
<key>AlwaysClearUserField</key> <true/>
When you log out, the user name field in the login window will be blank the next time you go to log in.
hello everybody, I was reading a ResExcellence article about improving app run times (and minimising pageouts), but it required one to start up from the OS 9 disk (ugh!) and format the existing hard drive (ugh! ugh!). So I created an alternative method.
I have the information up here, but I'll copy and paste the steps here. Read the rest of the article for the step-by-step instructions.
[Editor's note: I have no idea if this works nor the implications of trying it. There are other tips posted here with info on moving swap to another hard drive, but this seemed interesting enough to merit posting as an independent alternative. As with anything like this, make sure you have a good backup before you start changing the system files!]
Minor hint, and maybe obvious to most users, but could save time for some...
The recently distributed Open Firmware Password Utility allows users to protect their computer from starting up from an external cd ("C" boot) or another partition ("option" boot). However, option boot still works, but requests for the firmware password first.
Non-English users might have bad surprises after creating and activating their firmware password - in order to boot from another partition, the password has to be entered with the keyboard set as US-qwerty, presumably because the system doesn't yet know about international settings.
Good to know beforehand, specially since these non-standard procedures tend to be used only in special/emergency cases...
