Cool Mac Gear• iPod Video • iPod nano • iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Garageband |
My son dropped by last evening, and among other things, we had a conversation about the latest developments in OS X. Some Applelinks readers may recall Tristan's "Most Out Of Your Mac" columns here, and he has been a Mac OS X user from beta days. He now works for a Microsoft subcontractor doing telephone tech support, and just switched from Windows XP to hardware support. Tristan hasn't been using his Lombard a whole lot over the past summer. He's been busy with a variety of automotive projects, and after eight hours on computers each day at work, there's not a lot of incentive to get on the keyboard again at home, especially during the summer months. However, his friend's purchase of an 800 MHz Titanium PowerBook and the release of OS 10.2 Jaguar release have rekindled his Mac enthusiasm. "I was beginning to think that Windows XP wasn't so bad," he commented. "When you're not on the Mac a lot, you begin to forget what a piece of crap Window is by comparison." The new TiBook of course is running Jaguar, and Tristan and recently installed 10.2 on his 333 MHz Lombard (256 MB of RAM) as well. He says that Jaguar is quite snappy on the TiBook, and he's satisfied with how it performs on Lombard for his purposes that machine, which are mainly email and Web surfing these days. He is a complete OS X convert, and doesn't even have OS 9 installed on his PowerBook anymore. He does agree with me that the OS X GUI is sluggish, even on the TiBook, but is sanguine about putting up with that as the price of OS X's advantages. Last week, during his retraining for hardware support, Tristan took the Lombard to work and hooked it into the wireless LAN there. Eastern Nova Scotia is pretty solid PC country, and he says that many of his co-workers had never seen a Mac since the old 68k SEs and LCs they used back in grade school. The 333 MHz Lombard isn't exactly state-of-the-art, but he says that people were pretty impressed with it, the Dock especially being a hit. Go figure. Speaking of the Dock, one feature where Tristan thinks Windows X P has an edge is the popup menu up for open document windows in the Task Bar. That certainly would be convenient. I don't doubt that there's a shareware hack or two that can add that feature to the OS X Dock, but I haven't investigated. I have just continued with my OS 9 practice of collapsing my open document windows to their title bars using WindowShade X, which works for me, but it would be nice to have the popup menu as an option as well. Tristan likes the OS X Dock. In the classic Mac OS it was his practise to keep a row of aliases for his most-used applications at the bottom of the screen, so the Dock in its default position just enhances what he used to do anyway. I keep my Dock on the right-hand side of the screen, emulating as closely as possible to the old tear-off Application Switcher palette in OS 9. Both of us agree that one of the biggest beefs with OS X is that stuff doesn't always stay where you put it on the Desktop. I find that my hard drive partition icons especially bounce around a lot, which drives me nuts. I miss the spatial predictability of OS 9. As for my own adventures in Jaguar, I was happily able to get ViaVoice to work after a tussle getting it to hear the microphone after the system version upgrade. I found that what sometimes works is to open the Speech preferences panel, click on the "Apple Speakable Items" button, and when the little round microphone floater appears, press the Esc key and dictate a few words. If the system recognizes your microphone, the response will show up in the level indicator bars in the floater. I found that when ViaVoice gets cranky about microphone input, this will usually prod it into listening again. Not just a Jaguar issue. This used to happen occasionally in OS 10.1.x as well. It worked yesterday, and I've been able to dictate in ViaVoice under Jaguar ever since. In fact, I'm dictating this column right now. Footnotes; • Today's slate of my Applelinks news stories has been produced entirely in Jaguar. I estimate that it took me about an hour longer than usual, due to the various lags, slowdowns, sluggishness, double-pumps, erraticness, non-support of certain functions, and general angularity of OS X. • Does anybody know how to reassign the F-14 ans F-15 keys in Jaguar? I usually use them to toggle AppleScripts in Tex Edit Plus, but there's some annoying (and inscrutible) default function assigned in Jaguar. From David W. Murray
Dear Charles,
Agreed, just another thing in X that takes more operations than in 9. You can open the PDF in "Preview", then export in most other formats, including PICT. You might automate this via Applescript.
Best,
From John Konopka Charles, This is indeed a contentious issue. My take is that even with Jaguar the GUI is a little slow. In particular, it seems that OS X induces a short hesitancy before executing each mouse click. Scrolling is much improved in Jaguar, especially with QE, but still slower than scrolling in OS 9. On the other hand, AppleScript runs much faster, network file transfers are faster and copying files is faster. Also, I think that programs internally run very fast in X. One other thing to consider is that X is a true multitasking system. Therefore, if you have several programs running they will share the CPU time making any one of those run slower than they would alone. This is especially true if any of the programs have issues that cause them to hog computer time. I've seen one program which is a simple utility which uses something like 75% of the CPU time when it idles in the background. Eventually these speed issues will be settled. Better compilers will be produced for the PPC to make programs run more efficiently. X will be made to run faster. Faster CPUs will be made available. In other words, this is a temporary, if painful, transition. There should be a website someplace to collect suggestions for speeding up X. Personally, I think that having more memory helps. You can go to the Terminal and type in vm_stat to get an idea of how often pages are being swapped out to the hard drive. More memory reduces this swapping. Second, a faster hard drive should speed things up as X seems to hit the HD more than 9 did. I recently upgraded the HD in my Pismo to a Toshiba 40GB with liquid bearings. I am really pleased with the quietness of this drive. I have used it about four months now and it is still whisper quiet. My previous drives all got noisy after a few months. Toshiba offered a faster and slower version of this drive. I chose the slower drive and saved some money. I later saw an article on BareFeats comparing my drive with the faster Toshiba drive. The results were impressive. A faster HD can make a significant differnce in the speed of the overall system. P. J. Pedersen's problems with X are quite strange. He says it is crashing once a week for him. That is incredible. Most of us have had something like one crash per year. I suspect that there is a problem with the HD (it should be backed up then reformatted) or he is running a peripheral he didn't mention which is causing problems.
Regards,
Hi John;
No doubt amachine that supports Quartz Extreme would show improved performance, but as noted in the column above, my son says scrolling and Finder response are still sluggish in a brand new 800 MHz TiBook he uses.
I have 640 MB of RAM. The hard drive is definitely a bottleneck on this Pismo. For my exhaustive musings on this issue, see:
http://www.macopinion.com/columns/roadwarrior/02/07/30/index.html
For some OS X speed tips, go to:
Charles From Duncan H. Holley Hi Charles, I'm now running Jaguar on two different Macs, and I've found that a couple of factors which may effect the performance. I managed to finagle a Cube at the office, a 450 with the 16 meg video card, and which I've bumped up to 384 RAM. My personal machine is a 667 Tibook, the original with the 16 meg video card and 512 RAM. The Cube has the 1 meg cache at 225, the Ti a 256k at 667. My mini-odyssey went a bit like this: 1) First, I did a clean install of Jaguar on the Cube. I didn't have a 9.1 CD handy, so this machine doesn't yet have Classic on it. I found that when using the Cube with Jagaur next to my PowerBook with X.1.5, the Cube felt faster for finder functions and the like. Not a lot faster, but a little, and the machine having a slower processor and less RAM impressed me, and made me start to wonder. 2) I then did an upgrade install on the PowerBook, so as to not have to change my settings and such. Now, the machines run at almost exactly the same speeds for finder functions, or so it feels to me, I have not benchmarked this, nor do I intend to. The feel of the machine is the important part to me. The overall speed of the Ti with X.2.1 felt a bit faster than X.1.5 though not dramatically so. The obvious question is, why is the Cube as fast as the Ti? I have a few thoughts on this: 1) Could it be that with Quartz Extreme the video card is a large factor in finder response? Both these machines have 16 meg video cards, so that could explain the similarity. Sadly, I don't have another machine to test with, one that has a different amount of VRAM. It is my understanding however, that QE lets the V-card do most of the finder work, so the difference in processors and RAM shouldn't matter as much as they might for other applications. 2) It could be that a clean install runs faster than an upgrade install, so the slower machine gains an advantage with the clean install. I'm contemplating doing an archive install on the Tibook, but frankly, I'm don't look forward to the idea of putting everything back where it goes, just to test a speed theory. 3) The differences in the cache architecture might be at play here, but I honestly don't know enough about them to make an educated observation on that. I, rather simplistically, have wondered in the past if a quarter the cache, running at 2.5 x the speed was actually a downgrade from earlier macs (seems to me, that in the same amount of time, you'd get 0.625 the work done [1x 0.25 x 2.5= 0.625]). That might be coming in to play here. Again, I don't know enough about this (and am pleased with the current pro machines which have both) to make a call, but perhaps one of your other readers might. Likely, there's a combination of factors at work here, but since X is a testing environment for you anyway, I might suggest that you try the archive install, and see if you notice a difference from the upgrade install. Of course, since the Pismo does not support QE, your results might vary dramatically from my own.
Cheers,
Hi Duncan;
My erstwhile Cube 450 MHz was certainly a lot faster than this 500 MHz Pismo in OS X. I don't doubt that a clean install might help somewhat as well, but I will have to wait until I have the time to reinstall and reconfigure all the other software and system hacks. While my X install is mainly a test bed so far, I do need it configured to do the stuff I need to do. For example, I've been doing my production work in Jaguar for the past couple of days in order to get a real feel for the new system.
Charles
From Gene Steinberg I have installed it on a number of computers in the range of your Pismo, and I don't perceive it as annoyingly slow. My feeling is that a clean install may sometimes address speed issues. Did you try that, or just do a straight upgrade?
Hi Gene;
See my answer to Duncan above. I had hoped to have time to do a clean install, but haven't seen any daylight yet, and I decided that, what the hey -- I might as well do an upgrade install. At least it isn't any slower than 10.1.4. ;-)
Charles From Anonymous Charles, Goodness...no wonder the system is slow for you...Jaguar has no room to breath. You need at least 2 GB of free hard disk space for Jaguar to breath.
Sincerely,
Hi A.
You may be right. It's a 4 GB partition, which I thought would be plenty when I partitioned the drive a year ago. On the 20 GB drive as a whole (four partitions cumulatively) I still have about 8 GB free space. I don't know whether the other partitions count as "breathing space" or not.
I plan to do some weeding, and there is non-system stuff I can move to other partitions when I get a moment of breathing space of my own. ;-)
Charles From Darren Varner Guess I never noticed it. When I search, I type in the item, hit enter and it is almost instant. Works great from whatever app you are in as well. Congrats on going Jag.
Thanks.
You must have a faster machine than I do. ;-)
Or, the fact that I have 10,000 - 11,000 text archived on my HD (thr Complete Works of Me, plus a lot of other stuff) slows the indexing process down a bit.
Charles The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
Page: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5
|
Cool Mac Gear• iPod 1G-2G • iPod 3G • iPod 4G • iPod Mini • PowerBook-iBook • Keyboard Skins • Garageband
| ||||||
|
| ||||||||
