Sawtooth G4 Extremely Slow Flash

[jamesarcher]

Hi guys i know you have probably been asked this 1000 times but i cant seem to find any straight answers anywhere.

I have the following system:

Sawtooth G4
Dual 500Mhz G4 CPU's
2GB PC133 RAM
Seagate 80GB 7200RPM HDD
Samsung CDRW/DVD Combo Drive
NVidia Geforce 6200 AGP 256MB (Flashed) *Supports Core Image And Quartz*
OSX 10.4.11 *clean install*

I find flash extremely slow to the point where youtube videos cannot be watched at all. The CPU usage hits around 130% - 150% when running any flash content (including banner ads) in safari. It has now got to the point where i have disabled addons in safari so flash does not execute and safari pulls around 10% - 30% CPU for normal browsing.

The system itself runs extremely fluid and fast for normal tasks and i love it to bits. This is my first mac and as i cannot afford a new one i thought this would give me a good introduction to the mac world....i bought it very low spec and upgraded it to the dual 500 from a single, upped the ram form 256 to 2gb, flashed the geforce gpu to replace the stock rage, and also changed the dvd drive and hard disk.....its been a fun project and like i said i'm very happy with it.

Is there anything i could do to make flash acceptable as this is the only thing wrong with it now.

Thanks for any help

James

 

[vansmith]

No, that's just the way Flash is. You are unfortunately stuck with sub-par performance. Your only option is to downgrade to an older version but you then run the risk of not being able to view newer Flash content.

 

[dtravis7]

No, that's just the way Flash is. You are unfortunately stuck with sub-par performance. Your only option is to downgrade to an older version but you then run the risk of not being able to view newer Flash content.

Agreed with Van. On even my 733 Powermac I had to back up a version or so or YouTube videos were like slideshows. Flash for OSX is even worse than it is for Windows. Very CPU intensive and on older Power PC machines it hits 100% CPU here constantly.

What version of OSX and Flash?

 

[jamesarcher]

thanks for quick reply guys i have now downgraded form flash player 10.1 to flash player 9 and now videos and stuff are actually watchable rather than like dtravis7 said.....a slideshow. CPU usage is down about 30% with flash content as well bringing it down to 90% - 100% usage. I'm kinda curious now to see whether 8 performs any better while still working with modern sites. If i come across a download link i might just have to try it but for now at least its usable

 

[dtravis7]

Archived Flash Players for testing purposes

Almost every version of Flash.

Do read this about uninstalling just in case.

Downgrading to Flash 9 for Mac OS X @ ian glazer's tuesdaynight

 

[vansmith]

Be cognizant of my earlier warning though - the lower you go, the more content you are potentially preventing yourself from viewing. Google notes that you need Flash 7+ (see here) for instance to view YouTube videos. In my opinion, that's fairly low - you may very well come across content requiring much higher versions of Flash.

 

[dtravis7]

What Van is saying is true. So far though going back just the one version has caused no issues and made You Tube watchable which is nice at least!

As you go back in version though you might run into some compatibility issues like Van is talking about.

 

[vansmith]

You're absolutely right - going back to 9 is not likely going to cause you any problems. You might even be okay with 8 but I definitely wouldn't go any further back than that.

 

[jamesarcher]

Ok ive dropped it down to flash 8 and its now perfect i can watch videos and still use the computer at the same time cos flash doesnt cripple the browser.....i also downgraded from safari 4 to 3.1.1 and it seems perfect now