PowerPC :: Unbearably Slow 800mhz G4 IBook
Dec 29, 2007
I've got a G4 iBook here that is really really slow. It's running Mac OS 10.3.9, has an 800Mhz G4 CPU, and 1.12GB of ram (Built in 128mb + 1GB upgrade).
Activity monitor shows over 800mb of ram free, and about 16000/0 page ins/outs.
The CPU is also about 80% idle.
Something is fishy. There is only 6GB of free hard drive space.. but I don't see how that could cause this nightmarishly slow performance. It takes 5 minutes to open a folder sometimes! Could it be bad ram? Malfunctioning hard drive? Does it sound like a hardware issue or software issue?
I also noticed that there were a few folders in the hard drive such as "Previous Systems" "Rescued files" and "Damaged files." I already trashed "Damaged files" because it was just a bunch of random crap that no one would need and it was taking up space.
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Dec 23, 2007
My main lappy is a last revision 1.33GHz 12" iBook G4 with GB of RAM. In the past month or so, it has gotten slower and slower. Everything lags, and today when I entered an address into Camino, it took it a full 90 seconds to realize I had pressed enter, and get rid of the drop-down autocomplete.
I recently upgraded to Leopard. I thought this would help, but apparently not. Sadly. I just purchased a T41 ThoughtlessPad because i needed a FUNCTIONAL laptop.
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May 14, 2009
how do i do a diagnostic on the hd.
and is there a defragmenter like on pc's..sorry for that devil word.
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Jun 25, 2007
I have been viewing the forums for the past few months and have finally joined MacRumors as I have purchased an ibook G3 (first mac). I love it to death, it is so portable and even runs like a champ considering it is almost 4 years old. The ibook has a 800MHZ G3 processor along with maxed out ram at 640MB. Anyway I am planing on buying an TV before school starts up again and would like to encode my dvds to h.264. I was wondering if my computer can handle this task. BTW I would need to buy a dvd drive for my computer along with an external HDD. My other option is to buy a friends Powermac G4 with dual 1GHZ processors(he is selling it at $250) it already has a dvd drive and two 200GB HDD so that will save me ~ 150. As I am new to macs and would like to know if the Powermac will significantly make a difference in encoding times or should I just stick with my ibook and save the $100?
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Mar 14, 2008
I am working on a hardware hack with an iBook G4 800MHz where I can only power the iBook with the AC Adapter--NOT using the battery. When the compy is turned off and turned back on, I am getting this huge error message on the display that my time and date are wrong.
I gather there is no battery on the MB that sustains the internal clock--the compy uses the powerbook battery to keep the clock up to date?
Is there any way to set the system software to bypass or ignore the time and date? This computer is not connected to the internet, and time and date are irrelevant to my application.
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Nov 19, 2010
About a week ago I started having unbearably slow internet on a Mid 2009 MacBook Pro. The problem occurs on both wired and wireless connections. The problem occurs in Safari, FireFox, and Chrome. The browser stalls at the "connecting" phase of web page loading. Speed tests are not impacted. Sometimes it appears to load pages in "bursts". I have tried 3 changing the DNS and still have the problem. I have tried reinstalling OS X and still have the problem.
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Nov 7, 2007
After doing some iWeb+Safari and all my other apps, I bought a 1GB stick because it was pretty choppy with 768. After installing the new stick, I now have 1.5GB. When I type in iWeb, my letters still appear after i type them. The bigger the page (text wize), the more lag in letter appearance. IMO, it seems slower than before I upgraded the memory.
My PC has 256MB of ram and can do much more much faster.
While the letters lag in iWeb, I still have over 700MB free according to activity monitor. Before the ram upgrade, I was using pretty much all my memory (under 50MB left).
Is there some "time" which the new RAM readjusts itself in it's first boot? It does say 1.5GB in activity monitor. Is it possible that the ram doesn't actually work and I'm running 512MB?
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Mar 5, 2008
I just bought a used ibook g3 700mhz, 640mb ram, 22.5 of 30 gb HD space free. OSX 10.4.11 just installed cleanly. Pretty much everything I do is really slow and I cannot figure out for the life of me why. Simple procedures like opening the applications folder even take a long time. With the features, I would have expected this computer to be a lot faster. Am I wrong?
I also have a g4 tower with basically the same specs and it is MUCH faster.Anyone who can shed some light on this situation for me is greatly appreciated.
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Mar 7, 2008
hey i got a iBook and reinstalled the software and replaced the HD to something slightly newer. I did a hardware test and everything is working, just the battery is crap but i don't wanna buy for 100. im ok with ti being plugged in all the time im just wondering, any way to speed it up? i was windering about leopard. i hear it doesnt run well.
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Dec 11, 2008
I gave my parents my old iBook G4 and it runs 10.5
Anyway I noticed the HDD is down to 10GB left out of 28GB or whatever it is. And it seems like the thing is just so slow. Safari just clocks and times out and quits. Everything else just seem unusually slow.
Should i revert back to 10.4? Or is there something else I can look at to help the old G4 work a tad faster.
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Sep 1, 2006
What's strange about this problem is that it's the second time that it's happened to me (once a few months ago). I've got an iBook G4 from a few years ago, never had a problem, but out of the blue today my computer took about 15 minutes to get to the main loading screen. Everything is slowed down immensely, so I'm not really sure what to do. I checked the activity monitor and it seems okay, although it spikes on the disk activity screen randomly even if I am not running any other programs for both data read and data written.
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Jul 13, 2007
I have an iBook G4 1.42Ghz with 1.5GB of RAM. I have noticed lately (past month) that it has been slowing down...A BIG SLOW DOWN. You would think even with 1.5GB of RAM, there should be no slow down, but I guess I was wrong. I did a Hardware test using the install disks and everything is OK. Should I erase my HD and just re-install OS X? If you guys got any other suggestions please let me know.
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Aug 2, 2007
well like the title says, my iBook was running just fine, and for some reason when i start it up yesterday it took like minute and a half to start up, when it usually starts in a bout less than a minute, and once its up i get the beach ball everytime i do something, is driving me crazy! my ibook, is a g3 800mhz, 640 ram, mac os 10.4.10, what could be wrong with it??
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Oct 31, 2008
It's not the router, I know that..
On speedtest.net to Montreal I get around 4-5mbps download usually. On another laptop, I get 15-18mbps. laptops are side-by-side. It also randomly will stop working (ie in Firefox it'll take a minute to open a page (that's just doing the hostname lookup.. I use free DNS servers, my ISP's were slow.)
Any reason why the airport extreme card is extremely slow? Also, when I do a direct ethernet connect, it's also slow... ?
I did get 11 mbps a long time ago, I never seemed to get that again. I am using 10.4.11, 1.2ghz, 768mb ram. I do the speedtest when basically nothing is running (Adium/Skype is all pretty much).
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Dec 9, 2006
I have had my iBook for a good 4 years now. I have a 1.2ghz G4 ppc running Tiger and it is starting to run slow. I noticed that videos will now pause if something else is running or downloading. This never happened before. I was thinking about reinstalling my OS but would like to avoid that. Does anyone have this same problem or have any tricks to speed this up again?
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Feb 7, 2007
I have a 1.2 Ghz Power PC Ibook that has been a flawless laptop for almost two years now. Yesterday, I noticed that the screen wold periodically dim/brighten every couple of seconds. As I looked at the battery icon, I noticed that each time it dimmed, the charge icon would switch to a battery (as if the laptop wasn't plugged in), and each time it brightened, the corresponding charge icon would appear.
This happens even though it is plugged in, and usually, if I adjust the power cord, then it stops. But each time I have had to do this, it becomes less responsive to the method! Now I'm afraid my computer will simply die a slow death, with me frantically jiggling a cord to no avail, watching as it breathes its last breath, unable to be repowered!
PS: I'm an American, in Germany, who will be in London next week and able to visit a genius bar there...but I'm not positive that my warrranty extends beyond American borders.
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Nov 13, 2007
I was recently given a (supposedly) non-functional iBook. I reinstalled Tiger on it, and it did fine through the installation and initial startup. However, everything runs really, really slow. It will work normally for about 5 seconds, and then slow to a crawl. Opening system preferences just took 5 minutes. The beach ball shows up with nearly every click.
Anyone know what this means? Bad ram? Bad HD? It is the 14" 1.42 ghz model with 756 mb ram.
Oh yeah, the reason it was presumed dead was because the previous owner smacked it on something, and the LCD screen is bashed up. The rest of it seems physically fine, but it was subject to some sort of impact.
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Feb 11, 2008
Her laptop is running terribly slow. She uses this computer for iTunes/iPod and running Safari and Word...not much else. Not sure why she would be having any problems. Hardrive space isn't a problem, as there is about 10G availableThe computer boots VERY slow...it takes at least 5 minutes. Once running, launching any application takes much longer than it should. Surfing the net also is very spotty. A page will load, then for no reason, the spinning beach ball (SBB) pops up and freezes the computer for 30 seconds to a minute. This happens the entire time online for any page...even after the page is fully loaded the computer continues to have the SBB appear every few minutes. This issue is not isolated to Safari...it seems the entire OS is lagging horribly. I tried running Disk Utility, which couldn't even finish. After spending 10+ minutes with the progress bar not moving, I gave up.
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Oct 19, 2008
I have an IBOOK G4 running Tiger 10.4.11, which recently I upgraded from 768M to 1.25G RAM. It has an 80G HD which has about 50G free. I use it generally email and surfing the web. Recently, it started to run slow. Seems to be while surfing the internet. I use Safari. While surfing a while back it became very slow to respond on web pages, mostly got the "spinning color wheel", and then got pretty hot and the fan came on, first time I have heard the fan since I have had it.
After researching, I downloaded Onyx maintenance program. After doing a thorough maintenance using Onyx, everything seems to be back to normal. Well, a few days later, after using laptop for quite a while roughly 1 1/2 hours, started to run slow while surfing again. Slow to respond, spinning wheel again, but the mouse (bluetooth) movement is never affected.
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Nov 2, 2008
My old clamshell iBook seems to be running very slow suddenly, I have to wait for typing to catch up with me and in this chatroom I go in, the chat screen keeps filling in and changing to same colour as background so I cant read what people have sent into room or and all buttons disappear until I run cursor over where they were!
It doesnt do this when I go in same room on iMac. It didnt used to do it on the iBook either! is it just getting old and needs replacing? Think mine was made in 2000, so is about 8 years old.
How do I do things like disk defragment or see how much hard drive and memory is been used? I wondered if it was maybe full?
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Sep 27, 2009
Hi Everyone
I have an iBook G4 with 800MHz and 512 MB. I understand this is the max I can run this on. I really cannot afford a new one now and wondered if there was a way to increase the memory at all or get it to run faster. I deleted programs I do not use but it is still slow.
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Sep 27, 2009
I recently bought myself an Xtra monitor to hook up to my Ibook. I also used the hack to be able to split up the monitors to have full resolution of my new monitor.
but now my computer is running slower. somewhere in this forum I have found out that because of the hack my Ibook now has to work extra hard to be able to run on 2 monitors.
my question is, isn't there a way to be able to use my new monitor at full resolution and just shut of the original Ibook monitor? so my Ibook does not have to split up his memory? If I mirror them I Can't work on full resolution ...
somebody doing this?
Or... What do I do/buy/download that my Ibook can work on 2 monitors, but doesn't run slower.
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Feb 4, 2008
Just wondering if anyone's tried to run Mac OSX 10.5 on their 800mhz G4 and how the performance is (good/bad)? Obviously the cutoff is 867mhz.
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May 30, 2010
Now, my poor little G4 was just standing there. After a lot of fumbling around, restores, it finally has regained life, running Tiger etc.
Now, I wanted to install Leopard, see for myself what I would prefer, and it would allow to tether wireless internet connection through my iPhone to the G4. But I need Leopard for that, Tiger is too old.
So, after Googling, I found out that if I put my Intel into Target Disk mode, I could use it as external DVD reader, seeing my G4's reader is dead as dead can be.
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Dec 12, 2010
My brother has a second gen, 800Mhz eMac (the one that could be overclocked to 1.33Ghz - the earlier PC133 ram model). Since about 1.5 mths ago, when he powers it on, sometimes it will not power on, and other times it will give three beeps (diagnostic pages say bad RAM) and a flashing power/sleep light in unison with the beeps. Did this vintage suffer bad caps? I recall that it was only the 1.25Ghz model that had bad caps, but I could be wrong.
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Dec 20, 2007
I have an eMac 800mhz and I'm having trouble discerning whether it's an "early" build which needs the original AP card or a later build. What exactly am I looking for in the system profiler to tip me off?
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Aug 13, 2010
I have a G3 iBook and just the other day the display stopped working. There were no signs of the display going bad, it's just went. Am I able to boot the iBook via Target Disk Mode on my PowerBook and run the iBook Hardware Test CD on it? Also, can I reboot my PowerBook and choose the iBook as the startup volume?
I know how to do Target Disk Mode but the latter I'm not sure about.
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Oct 20, 2006
My brother's iBook G4 (800Mhz, First Rev) has completely splattered itself and we're getting a new Macbook for him under insurance. My iBook G3 (White, 900Mhz G3..the last G3 Rev of the iBook) has a failing hard drive.
Now, could I swap out those two drives, at least to recover stuff? And is there a specific method of opening up the iBook G4 so that I don't break stuff (I've already messed with my G3..and ended up with a dozen extra screws ^_^
Mainly the aim is to salvage the hard drive and swap them out; replacing my faulty iBook G3 one with the iBook G4 one which is perfectly fine.
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Dec 11, 2010
Hey guys, i got an old Powerbook that the whole family use to surf the net. I notice its been super slow lately. Ive never had a problem with this notebook, I've only done 2 reinstall in the time ive owned it. I recentluy did another one, and notice its still slow, loading websites is slow, cant watch movies on it. This is a notebook i use to do photoshop and illustrator work on.
Do you think its just its time? I think it could be the hard drive or memory, is there any type of diagnostic i can do to find out what the problem is?
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Apr 5, 2007
My iBook G4 power supply failed and I'm awaiting a replacement. In the mean time, can I use the power supply from my iBook G3 with the iBook G4?
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