Speeding up OS X
Having just been through some emails with work colleagues complaing about slow performance in Windows, it got me thinking about what I could do to speed up my nearly 4-year-old Powerbook G4 with 1.25GB of RAM. I’m going to capture here some of the things I tried, and will keep updating them as I find more. It has slown down significantly under 10.5, and Mail in particular has not been very useable at times.
1. Turn off 3d dock. This creates a flattened Dock. I also turned off Magnification – Apple > Dock > Turn Magnification Off. Certainly doesn’t take as much CPU and it looks a little cleaner to boot.
defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES
killall Dock
2. I closed all my widgets as I had read that they can take up 10MB per widget! Seems a little excessive, but given how infrequently I use them, I can lose them for a while.
3. Upgrade the RAM – this one is going to cost some money. Currently it is running at 1.25GB and this appears to be right at the minimum required for OS X 10.5. My Page Outs are currently running at 143MB, which suggests I don’t have enough RAM. So time to look at replacing a 256MB module with a 1GB one and taking it to 2GB.
Update: 2008-05-30
After two weeks I have found the machine to be quite a bit more responsive. Sure, there are times when I have memory hungry applications open that it does slow down, but for general use – email, browsing, and working on documents, it has improved. I think the main improvement has been the bump to 2GB of RAM, but I think the other changes have helped as well. I wonder if I’ll be able to eeek the life of my laptop out to five years now!