[Hidden-tech] Mac 10.4 Questions

David Haines david at coresolutiongroup.com
Sun Aug 26 23:16:25 EDT 2007


On Aug 24, 2007, at 4:21 PM, Lynn Nichols wrote:

>   ** The author of this post was a Good Dobee.
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> Hi Shel,
>
> Believe it or not, I've been told (by the repair staff at  
> Diversified Computers in Keene) that OS X will run slow with less  
> than about 50 gigs of hard drive space. Have you considered getting  
> an external drive and moving some of your files to it to save space  
> on your main hard drive?

Well, that claim about 50 gigs is akin to saying, "you need to have  
6" rims for your car tires" - an absolutely meaningless metric in the  
absence of any coherent context.
It's critical to have at least (a real-world minimum of) 15 % free of  
the total formatted space of your drive, but then we start to look at  
how much swap space gets set aside (taking up/needing additional  
drive space) , which will depend on how much RAM you have installed.
Some drive space will always be used for virtual memory, as it's  
always on.

10.4 has significant RAM requirements, but "how much" depends on what  
you're doing with it. In general 512 MB is a real-world minimum. Less  
RAM means alot more use of the hard drive ("swapping") which is  
always going to be slower than real RAM.

As well, if you have a G4 iMac and you happen to have the original  
hard drive, it may be due for replacement.
It spins several thousand times per minute and unavoidably wear out  
over time.

Please know that removing files from your drive will probably make no  
appreciable difference in speed in any way, unless your drive is  
dangerously full (see above). I suspect age is a greater factor here.
If you work with /really/ big files then you might need to defragment  
your drive (I won't suggest any product for doing so, I trust none of  
them), but keep in mind that OS X automatically defragments your  
files on the fly if they're fragmented and 20 MB or under in size,  
but this only happens as the file is accessed. Also, OS X does hot- 
file clustering, moving your most-used files to areas of the drive  
that provide faster access time (for the drive mechanism).

Some info here
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=25668


You can get a free version of Stuffit from their site, they make you  
dig for it however.
In general no router should require a driver for you to use it.  
Possibly newer firmware but that's distinct from a driver.

In terms of download speed: what is your connection, and perhaps you  
might want to do a real-world comparison using another computer.

As this is something I do professionally on a daily basis, I'll stop  
here. Hopefully some of what I've stated will be of help to you.
Best of luck !

David Haines,
Apple Desktop, Laptop and OS X Server-certified technician of many  
years.



>
> Shel Horowitz wrote:
>>   ** The author of this post was a Good Dobee.
>>   ** You too can help the group
>>   ** Fill out the survey/skills inventory in the member's area.
>>   ** If you did, we all thank you.
>> I'd appreciate some help with a few snags I've run into with Mac  
>> OS 10.4.10.
>> 1) I tried to uncompress a new driver for my router, which all of  
>> a sudden can only find the two hard-connected computers and not  
>> anything over the wireless network. Stuffit Expander told me it  
>> couldn't run without Stuffit Engine, which has unaccountably  
>> vanished from my computer. Searching the web, it seems it's no  
>> longer a no-cost product, and nor could I find any competitors.  
>> Given how few files I need to decompress, I'm not in a great rush  
>> to buy a file uncompressor.  What are folks using these days?
>> 2) Is there *any* way to change the default setting on the  
>> Finder's search function so that it searches a string in a file  
>> name, rather than a text string within documents? I could  
>> literally write an article while it searches and I always forget  
>> to change it. Besides, it would save me oodles of time  
>> reconfiguring it every day if I could default to what I need for  
>> 98 percent of my searches.
>> 3) In general, performance on my G4 iMac has been absurdly slow  
>> for several months. Yes, I have a lot of files--but  I also have  
>> 11.87 GB of unused disk space. It just crawls--like taking several  
>> minutes over broadband to download the router firmware. Any  
>> recommendations to speed it up? I was thinking I could off-load  
>> several gigs to an external drive, and that might at least speed  
>> up iPhoto. is that a good method? Are there better?
>> 4) I'm using Spamfire 1.0. Recentl, I started having a problem  
>> with some mail addressed to shel at principledprofit.com--but when I  
>> try to rescue, Spamfire gives me: "Error 450 unable to find  
>> principledprofits.com" (note the s in the domain--it's not in the  
>> actual email). The company has closed its support department. Any  
>> ideas?
>> Thanks so much,
>
> -- 
> Lynn A. Nichols, Starstruck Design
> Web, Email and Print Solutions for Future-minded Businesses
> 335 West Gill Road, Gill, MA 01354, 413-863-7752
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