PowerBook G4 running slow. please help!!!

My powerbook G4 (OSX 10.5) is starting to run slow:
- Applications are take longer to open and they lag a lot
- Online java applets also lag a lot
- Downloads also take a huge amount of time (but thats probably not my computers fault)

is there anything i can do to speed it up?

here are all the specs:
1.33GHz
768MB of RAM
7.47GB out of 55GB of memory left

thanks!

PFC

You could up the RAM by putting a 1GB stick in instead of your 512mb and try freeing up some disk space - got anything you don't need that you can get rid of or store on an external? Maybe a bigger hard drive...

run "top" in the terminal (or use the Activity Monitor) to see if you have any "hung" applications that are hogging the CPU. Sometimes a print process will mess things up, or in my case I've had OS 9's "TrueBlue Environment" hang up and use 90%+ of the CPU. Force quitting the offending process will solve that problem.

You should also look at the number of memory "Page-ins" versus the number of "Page-outs". If the page-out number is high (after a recent re-boot) then you need more RAM.

Here's a quick primer about memory paging.

http://www.macosg.com/group/viewtopic.php?t=1414

Also, the 7GB free on the hard drive is a little on the low end.

Scott