Wednesday, May 11, 2005
The search for computer speed -- why am I still looking in the same place?
Quite a few of you have asked why I bought Tiger instead of just buying a new Mac.
Awhile back I swore, publicly in fact, that I wasn't going to put any more money into this old 667 Mhz G4 Titanium PowerBook of mine. I said I wouldn't spend another penny on it, instead I'd just save those pennies and put them toward new a G5 PowerBook.
Trouble is, of course, there's no such thing as a G5 PowerBook, and at this point there's no real reason to believe there's going to be one any time in 2005. The fact that Apple went ahead and dumped all the new features it had been saving for the G5 PowerBook into the most recent G4 revision, signaled that loud and clear. You don't go putting cool new stuff like brace for impact and two-finger scrolling into the G4 if you have any hope that the G5 might be around the corner.
So the logical move, of course, is to upgrade to a new G4 PowerBook. Apple has pulled all the stops out on this latest model, and it's virtually the perfect laptop with the singular exception of the fact that it sportsa chip from the same processor family that's sitting in my current three year old laptop. Two grand is, after all, an awful lot of money to dump into a machine that I'll be looking to dump the minute the G5 comes out (right at a time, not coincidentally, when the resale value of a used G4 PowerBook will have just plummeted).
Regular readers will recall that I toyed for awhile with the idea of "upgrading" to a twelve inch G4 iBook, on the theory that dumping one grand on yet another G4 laptop would be a little easier to stomach...especially considering that the G4 iBook isn't likely to suddenly see its resale value go off a cliff. But I just couldn't force myself to drop down to the iBook's lesser screen real estate, and the fourteen inch iBook doesn't help because it's the same exact resolution, just bigger.
So last week I decided, instead, to go ahead and see what Tiger might do for my current aging PowerBook in terms of speeding it up just enough to allow me to work at full speed. And after waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing my hard drive, after waiting for Mail to finish importing my email messages into itself, and after realizing that Dashboard was too much for my old rig to handle, I'd finally found a significant enough speed boost to satisfy me for at least a little while longer. Worth the price of purchase, even though I'll end up getting Tiger with my next machine anyway.
But then my speed boost disappeared this week. When you're on the phone and you're trying to find information in your computer related to that phone call, and your computer is responding so slowly that you're frustrated enough that you're making hand gestures toward your computer screen in the hopes that the darn thing will move a little faster, you know you're in trouble.
It didn't make sense, though. Was there something wrong with Tiger that was causing the machine to slow to a crawl? Or was one of my hardware components finally melting down? So I fired up Activity Monitor, and it was only then I noticed that my hard drive was more than ninety-five percent full.
And that I'm an idiot.
If one of my clients complained that their Mac had slowed to a crawl, the first thing I'd do is have them check their hard drive capacity. Seventy or eighty percent full, you're not in trouble. But ninety-five? That's like filling a Volkswagen full of clowns, and then wondering why the clown in the driver's seat can't drive very well. Could it be that there's three clowns sitting on his lap, two laying on the dashboard blocking his view, and another one crouched on the floor blocking the pedals? You get the idea.
At least I hope you do, 'cause that's about the best analogy I'm gonna come up with tonight.
I shouldn't have needed activity monitor to tell me that my drive was chock full o' crap; the bizarre slowdowns should have told me that right off the bat. But hey, it's been a busy week, so I'll let my idocy slide just this once. All the extra new and larger stuff that got installed with Tiger, must have pushed my drive to its limit, and I didn't even think to check.
I was thinking I might need to buy an external drive, but instead I went hunting for stuff to part with, and somehow managed to find fourteen gigabytes of old crap that I had no idea why I was keeping it. Problem solved. Now I see how fast Tiger is.
I'll tell you though, with the insane blowout prices that Amazon was offering last week on the previous generation of G5 iMac, I was awfully tempted to grab one for myself (can you say "$400 discount plus $100 rebate"? I thought so). My mother picked up one, thus finally replacing her seven year old (and dead) G3 iMac...and yet somehow the analysts can't figure out that Mac users go so much longer in between computer upgrades than PC users that it skews the marketshare numbers. But that's another issue entirely. I really did think hard about buying myself a G5 iMac and calling it a night, but at this point I'm too deeply entrenched as a laptop user. You, on the other hand, might want to consider grabbing one of those ridiculously discounted iMacs before they're all gone; they come with a Tiger upgrade disc in the box.
But back to our story, I picked up some extra RAM for my mother for her new iMac (what kind of Mother's Day gift is that? I really don't know), and in doing so I noticed that the prices on third-party RAM are perhaps half of what they were all of three months ago. Which means that, depending on which side of the bed I wake up on the rest of the week, I just might go ahead and bump my PowerBook up the gigabyte of RAM that it can hold. I really didn't want to go putting even more money into this computer, but with the price so low, it's almost a no-brainer. I think the only reason I'm waiting is that I want to see precisely what kind of impact the fourteen gigabytes of recovered hard drive space have on the machine's speed over the next few days. Once I get a feel for that, I'll go ahead and order the RAM and see what that does for me.
Why do it that way? Why not? The upside of having an aging Mac as your primary machine is that you do get to sort of turn it into a science experiment. But if I'm still using it when MacOS 10.5 comes out, someone please smack me.
Quite a few of you have asked why I bought Tiger instead of just buying a new Mac.
Awhile back I swore, publicly in fact, that I wasn't going to put any more money into this old 667 Mhz G4 Titanium PowerBook of mine. I said I wouldn't spend another penny on it, instead I'd just save those pennies and put them toward new a G5 PowerBook.
Trouble is, of course, there's no such thing as a G5 PowerBook, and at this point there's no real reason to believe there's going to be one any time in 2005. The fact that Apple went ahead and dumped all the new features it had been saving for the G5 PowerBook into the most recent G4 revision, signaled that loud and clear. You don't go putting cool new stuff like brace for impact and two-finger scrolling into the G4 if you have any hope that the G5 might be around the corner.
So the logical move, of course, is to upgrade to a new G4 PowerBook. Apple has pulled all the stops out on this latest model, and it's virtually the perfect laptop with the singular exception of the fact that it sportsa chip from the same processor family that's sitting in my current three year old laptop. Two grand is, after all, an awful lot of money to dump into a machine that I'll be looking to dump the minute the G5 comes out (right at a time, not coincidentally, when the resale value of a used G4 PowerBook will have just plummeted).
Regular readers will recall that I toyed for awhile with the idea of "upgrading" to a twelve inch G4 iBook, on the theory that dumping one grand on yet another G4 laptop would be a little easier to stomach...especially considering that the G4 iBook isn't likely to suddenly see its resale value go off a cliff. But I just couldn't force myself to drop down to the iBook's lesser screen real estate, and the fourteen inch iBook doesn't help because it's the same exact resolution, just bigger.
So last week I decided, instead, to go ahead and see what Tiger might do for my current aging PowerBook in terms of speeding it up just enough to allow me to work at full speed. And after waiting for Spotlight to finish indexing my hard drive, after waiting for Mail to finish importing my email messages into itself, and after realizing that Dashboard was too much for my old rig to handle, I'd finally found a significant enough speed boost to satisfy me for at least a little while longer. Worth the price of purchase, even though I'll end up getting Tiger with my next machine anyway.
But then my speed boost disappeared this week. When you're on the phone and you're trying to find information in your computer related to that phone call, and your computer is responding so slowly that you're frustrated enough that you're making hand gestures toward your computer screen in the hopes that the darn thing will move a little faster, you know you're in trouble.
It didn't make sense, though. Was there something wrong with Tiger that was causing the machine to slow to a crawl? Or was one of my hardware components finally melting down? So I fired up Activity Monitor, and it was only then I noticed that my hard drive was more than ninety-five percent full.
And that I'm an idiot.
If one of my clients complained that their Mac had slowed to a crawl, the first thing I'd do is have them check their hard drive capacity. Seventy or eighty percent full, you're not in trouble. But ninety-five? That's like filling a Volkswagen full of clowns, and then wondering why the clown in the driver's seat can't drive very well. Could it be that there's three clowns sitting on his lap, two laying on the dashboard blocking his view, and another one crouched on the floor blocking the pedals? You get the idea.
At least I hope you do, 'cause that's about the best analogy I'm gonna come up with tonight.
I shouldn't have needed activity monitor to tell me that my drive was chock full o' crap; the bizarre slowdowns should have told me that right off the bat. But hey, it's been a busy week, so I'll let my idocy slide just this once. All the extra new and larger stuff that got installed with Tiger, must have pushed my drive to its limit, and I didn't even think to check.
I was thinking I might need to buy an external drive, but instead I went hunting for stuff to part with, and somehow managed to find fourteen gigabytes of old crap that I had no idea why I was keeping it. Problem solved. Now I see how fast Tiger is.
I'll tell you though, with the insane blowout prices that Amazon was offering last week on the previous generation of G5 iMac, I was awfully tempted to grab one for myself (can you say "$400 discount plus $100 rebate"? I thought so). My mother picked up one, thus finally replacing her seven year old (and dead) G3 iMac...and yet somehow the analysts can't figure out that Mac users go so much longer in between computer upgrades than PC users that it skews the marketshare numbers. But that's another issue entirely. I really did think hard about buying myself a G5 iMac and calling it a night, but at this point I'm too deeply entrenched as a laptop user. You, on the other hand, might want to consider grabbing one of those ridiculously discounted iMacs before they're all gone; they come with a Tiger upgrade disc in the box.
But back to our story, I picked up some extra RAM for my mother for her new iMac (what kind of Mother's Day gift is that? I really don't know), and in doing so I noticed that the prices on third-party RAM are perhaps half of what they were all of three months ago. Which means that, depending on which side of the bed I wake up on the rest of the week, I just might go ahead and bump my PowerBook up the gigabyte of RAM that it can hold. I really didn't want to go putting even more money into this computer, but with the price so low, it's almost a no-brainer. I think the only reason I'm waiting is that I want to see precisely what kind of impact the fourteen gigabytes of recovered hard drive space have on the machine's speed over the next few days. Once I get a feel for that, I'll go ahead and order the RAM and see what that does for me.
Why do it that way? Why not? The upside of having an aging Mac as your primary machine is that you do get to sort of turn it into a science experiment. But if I'm still using it when MacOS 10.5 comes out, someone please smack me.
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