g4 performance

I was under the impression that powermac g4's were decent machines. For the money, I am not impressed in the performance whatsoever. Is this a normal reaction coming from a windows user? It just seems so slow for an everyday machine. Exactly where do macs shine the most? Music? Video editing?

If your Mac has only 256 MB of memory (as it says in your specs) that might be what's slowing you down. OS X likes to have double or even triple that...or even more if you're dealing with large files in your apps.

A G4/733 is a "decent" machine for everyday stuff, and maybe some occaisional photo editing or home movie. It was state of the art about 3.5 years ago, and will still run OS X 10.3 and almost any app. You may find the performance disappointing, depending on how fast a PC you're used to.Even on the fastest Macs, OS X is a little less "snappy" than Windows. On the other hand, it usually stays responsive even when an app is doing some heavy processing.

Good luck.

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Well, I just purchased a 512 stick of crucial sdram so hopefully that will speed things right up. Has anyone here done the 1.4ghz powerlogix upgrade? Does it really increase performance that much? Thanx

I did the 1.2Ghz Powelogix(shows up as 1.3Ghz) upgrade to my G4/400 and it was like night and day. I had the same RAM etc before and after the upgrade, so all I saw was the processor speed bump. It was worth the $$$$$, and will keep my G4 running for a few more years at least. I may even consider going to a dual 1.4Ghz card next.