I've been running MacOS X 10.0/1 on my clamshell iBook for quite some time. My only major complaint is that MacOS X 10.0/1 apparently doesn't do a good job of supporting the graphics chip in the iBook (ATI Rage Mobility 128), which means that drawing things is a little slow. I've heard that Jaguar has improved graphics chip support, but I can't seem to find anywhere a list of exactly what support has been improved. Anyone know?

The biggest graphics benefit of jaguar is Quartz Extreme which requires an AGP graphics card with 32 megs of RAM and some compositing features. The Mobility 128 does not qualify. I do think there is better support under Jaguar for the Mobility 128 (I have the same iBook) but it isn't a night and day difference. There are however, more than enough other little improvements is jag to justify the upgrade. Not to mention that it is required for some of the new iApps and Safari.

-Mike

Like the other poster said, you're not going to get a huge video speedup with that 128 card. But jag does have a bunch of other small improvments that really add up. It's considerable faster, even without a QE capable card.

I have a G4/667 powerbook, so QE is supported. But it was still a lot faster to boot up and whatnot. Apps bounce less, etc. Get jag, it's what OS 10.0 should have been.

Old thread.

I just bought 10.2 and, while I'm impressed with a number of things (not the least of which being able to run some 10.2-only apps), speed is not one of them. It appears to be paging way more than under 10.1. I'm starting to think that I've got way too little memory in my iBook (as opposed to simply too little) and am considering upgrading it. I can get a 512MB SODIMM for right at US$100 (pretty cheap), but I don't want to spend it if it's not going to help at all. Right now, I've got 192MB, and that 512MB stick would replace the 128MB stick I've got in there now to bring me up to 576MB.

How much memory do you have in your iBook, and does your seem to page out to disk a lot (grind the hard drive when it should just be accessing memory)?

What's with the current fad with naming everything Xtreme or Extreme? To me it just looks stupid...

- Trevor

Getting above 256mb would probably help quite a bit. I have 320mb in my G4 Cube, and am considering replacing one of the 64mb modules with a 256mb or 512mb DIMM. It won't bring too many benefits above the 320 I have, but should help with things like my growing iPhoto library and such.

How much memory do you have in your iBook

Currently I have about 310Megs (256+64). When I first started running 10.2 I only had 128. I don't recall 10.2 paging any more than 10.1, but it has been a while since I upgraded. OS X in general will page quite a bit (since it is a unix it burns a lot of memory on filesystem caches and such as well).

Take a look in /private/var/vm/ and see how many swapfiles it is using (it will create 80Meg swap files as needed). If you've got more than a couple more memory will likely speed things up.

If you plan on keeping your iBook for a while you might also want to consider buying a faster laptop hard drive for it. The drives in the older iBooks are seriously slow and you might get more of a speed improvement from a faster drive than more memory. The most effective upgrade I ever installed in my desktop mac (Beige G3/266Mhz upgraded to G4/500Mhz/640M RAM) was a 7200 RPM hard drive with a big cache.

-Mike

Dude, are we the same person? I also have a Beige G3. Do you have a Sun Ultra1?

I'll have to check on the swap files. I didn't realize that it dynamically created them like that.

I've been looking for a good indicator of ``low on memory'', but I can't seem to find a really good one, and I'm not enough of a Mach or BSD guru to be able to interpret vm_stat output for this purpose. Your idea is the best I've seen so far.

Did your 128->310 upgrade help?

I also have a Beige G3 in original condition. I would like to upgrade the hard drive, but I have no idea how to clone a Mac hard drive to another. I do not have any OS media, so I do not have the luxury of being able to just re-install the OS. My drive is currently running System 9.21 (I think... I know it is 9.something).

Is there anything on the web that will tell me how to copy my original drive to an empty one and expand the partition(s). I looked a few times and came up empty. Thanks.

You need a bootable disc with drive utilities. Since you still have OS 9, it is trivial to make a disc assuming you have a burner on the Mac. This MacOSXHint seems to cover everything you need.

If you don't have Toast, or a burner on OS 9, use Disk Copy to create an image, then format it Mac OS Standard per the link above. That image might be burnable in a Windows machine. I was able to use the OS X Disk Copy program to make a CD Image, then later burn it with Nero.

edit - Sorry, forgot your actual question of copying the drive. It should just involve installing the new one, formatting it and "blessing" it (aka in Drive Setup, insure you check "Install Mac OS Drivers" or some such), then dragging and dropping the files from one drive to another. Using a boot CD will be the best way to ensure the drives are duplicated exactly, as none of the system files will be in use on the drive.

I have a Plextor 8x SCSI burner here I can throw in there. I think the CD-ROM is SCSI and the hard drive IDE (I hope) in this machine. If that's the case, I should be all set..... sort of. I still need a recording program for the Mac.

Will the drive utilities allow me to copy one drive to another?

The "Disc Burner" Utility should be enough, if you first use Disk Copy to create the CD you want.

Will the drive utilities allow me to copy one drive to another?

See my edit to the post above.

Excellent. Thank You.

Now I can start making my Mac do things!

Dude, are we the same person? I also have a Beige G3. Do you have a Sun Ultra1?

Ha, nope but I do have a NeXT Cube if that counts for anything.

Did your 128->310 upgrade help?

It wasn't really earth shattering for me since I don't tend to run a whole lot of stuff at the same time on that laptop. Generally just a web browser and email client which ran OK with just 128. On the rare occasions when I do need to run a couple of java programs, photoshop, Project Builder, etc it helps a lot.

-Mike

i've got four NeXT cubes out in the garage. i think only one of the screens is still bright enough to be readable. i have a NeXTdimension board in one, but the sony color monitor i had hooked up to it lost its' flyback transformer, and i have been too lazy to get it fixed.

--dan.

I've got three 80MB swap files. That's more swap than there is physical memory in the computer. But I'll assume that Darwin is fairly modern and pages instead of swaps and that 240MB of swap is not unreasonable.

But I was using the thing last night running nothing besides a browser beyond the normal iBook processes and it was constantly grinding the disk. It was incredibly slow. I never encountered this running a single application under 10.1. Unless I can find some memory to borrow before the next time I get paid, I think I'm just going to take my chances and order some new memory anyway. As I said, it's fairly cheap.

Edit: fixed an unclear antecedent

But I'll assume that Darwin is fairly modern and pages instead of swaps and that that's not unreasonable.

Yep, and top allows you to see pagein and pageout statistics. The number in parenthesis reflects the current statistics, while the other number reflects total page activy since boot.

Yeah, but basic paging statistics do not necessarily indicate anything, at least without further knowledge of how the OS deals with VM.

Some Unices are constantly paging in order to keep the free list up to date, and paging activity merely indicates that memory is being used and released. In other words, perfectly normal activity. Solaris is one such beast. The best indicator under Solaris for more memory is its scanrate value, which indicates how often the kernel goes searching for pages it can swap out A constant high value means that the kernel is constantly swapping active pages in and out of the hard drive. But that's not likely to be an accurate indicator under Darwin, since (1)Darwin is bound to use a vastly different VM system, and (2) Darwin's vm_stat has no scanrate value. In fact, pagein and pageout might be valid indicators of low memory in Darwin, but I doubt it, and I don't have the time or skill to dig through kernel source to figure it out. I need someone to figure it out for me.

I'm at the point where other evidence, though, namely the constant hard drive grinding, points strongly to too little memory.

But I'll assume that Darwin is fairly modern and pages instead of swaps and that that's not unreasonable.

Yeah, that isn't terrible. I have had a dozen or so going on my work computer when doing java development.

But I was using the thing last night running nothing besides a browser beyond the normal iBook processes and it was constantly grinding the disk. It was incredibly slow. I never encountered this running a single application under 10.1

Hmm, that just doesn't sound right. Here is a few things you might want to check... Is it possible that you've got something else running that is grinding the hard drive besides swap? Have you ever installed Norton Utilities, Virex, or some other evil maintenance tool that likes to do things in the background? Does 'top -u' show anything burning a lot of CPU? Are you running out of hard drive space (less than a gig or so free)? Do you have anything running at startup (/Library/StartupItems) that you don't need? Have you tried booting single user (hold down Command-S) and doing a fsck?

Also, consider running a cache cleaner like this one to delete any temp files that may be hanging around. If you use the deep cleaning mode it will also delete kernel extension (kext) caches and other random things that could cause problems if corrupted. I have only personally used this particular tool once so don't blame me if it does something evil.

-Mike

There's not anything evil running on the computer, either a process of my own making or Norton, et al. The CPU isn't even all that utilized, really. I'm getting the grinding when doing stuff as simple as scrolling in the browser, which ought to be all memory-related. I don't think an fsck would make a difference, but I'll give it a shot.

However, I am running a little low on drive space. What difference would that make?

However, I am running a little low on drive space. What difference would that make?

Fragmentation. As you run out of drive space HFS+ will get more and more fragmented and you run out of spaces on the drive where you can write a big hunk of data consecutively. Swapping to a file on a fragmented drive can be particularly nasty because the system ends up allocating a swapfile that is all over the drive so it has to seek like crazy which slows down swapping considerably. Norton Speed Disk and Techtool Pro are two utilities that will attempt to minimize fragmentation, but if this is what is causing you problems it will happen again sooner or later if you don't free up some space. I try to keep at least a gig free on all my machines or use a dedicated partition for the swapfiles.

-Mike

That's obnoxious. You'd think that the OS could peg those swapfiles as contiguous when it creates them before there's any additional data. Is there a defrag utility for MacOSX that you're aware of? (I've been meaning to clean up my filesystems anyway.)

That's obnoxious. You'd think that the OS could peg those swapfiles as contiguous when it creates them before there's any additional data. Is there a defrag utility for MacOSX that you're aware of? (I've been meaning to clean up my filesystems anyway.)

Well, it creates the swapfiles as needed and destroys them when they are no longer needed so there isn't really any way that I can think of for them to guarantee contiguous space for them (without a dedicated partition). I do think it is pretty rediculous that Apple hasn't come up with an automatic way to defrag the filesystem yet though. Maybe once they get their journaling enhancements a little more final. As far as a defrag util, Techtool Pro and Norton Speed Disk are the only options I know of.

-Mike

I cleared out a lot of hard drive space and fsck'd it from single-user mode (didn't know the Command-S trick, thanks) (the filesystem checked fine -- no errors) and now it works like a champ.

I don't get it. It doesn't appear to be accessing the drive much at all now. Why would clearing drive space obviate the need for swapping activity? Maybe it was just horribly fragmented before. I'm still thinking about getting more memory for it, though.

Of course, I also need to replace the battery. It'll barely last 15 minutes now.

Why would clearing drive space obviate the need for swapping activity?

I would assume it is still swapping just not taking nearly as long if you've got enough contiguous space for the swapfiles.

I also need to replace the battery. It'll barely last 15 minutes now.

Might be worth trying this unless your sure the battery is really toast.

Can you tell I used to do Mac support for a living

-Mike

I'm pretty sure it's toast, but I can't see anything that would contraindicate giving that a shot.

Ooo, I wonder if there's any way to do that PMU-reset thing on my wife's laptop. She bought a new battery for it, and it'll only recharge to 49 percent, no further.

No joy on the PMU reset. This battery is just dead.

Of course, I just found that my wife spent $500 on utter crap in the last few days, so I probably won't get either a new battery or more memory or any of the hundreds of things ....

I'll take this somewhere else.

"Contraindicate"? Man, kudos for fitting that word into a post.