17" Powerbook G4

i Have the last of the g4 17" laptops and love it but lately its got really slow
is there any thing i can do to speed it back up i dont have any disk's that it came with but have ordered 10.5.6 OSX would this cure any problems if i do a clean install after time machine back up
thanks in advance

any advice would be much appreciated

nelo36

Which version of OS X are you running on the PowerBook right now? You mentioned backing up with Time Machine, but that's only available with Leopard and Snow Leopard. If you need to backup the PB before installing Leopard, you could possibly use something like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner.

And yes, generally a clean install of the operating system will help to speed things up somewhat. There are other things you can do for your PB to speed it up: such as adding more memory and a larger faster hard drive.

hi chscag am running 10.5.8 been ok for few years now but running a bit slow as of late did time machine back up to ext hdd but dont know how to clean install as never done it
could you advise the procedure or any one else advise

thanks in advance
nelo

nelo36 said:

hi chscag am running 10.5.8 been ok for few years now but running a bit slow as of late did time machine back up to ext hdd but dont know how to clean install as never done it
could you advise the procedure or any one else advise

Click to expand...

How full is your hard drive? A "mostly" full hard drive can slow things down. Also...when was the last time you repaired permissions?

HTH,

- Nick

swapped to a 320 gb last year so plenty of space

nelo36 said:

swapped to a 320 gb last year so plenty of space

Click to expand...

Sounds like you're assuming you have a lot of free hard drive space (due to the upgrade)...but last year was at least 11 months ago.

Some folks can fill up a hard drive really quickly depending on what they're doing. If you haven't already done so...check how much hard drive free space you have...just to be 100% sure.

- Nick

hi nick
just checked hdd space got over 200bg left so no storage problems

so doing back up and will hopefully do a clean install
once i figure out how to do it
regards

lee

nelo36 said:

hi nick
just checked hdd space got over 200bg left so no storage problems

so doing back up and will hopefully do a clean install
once i figure out how to do it
regards

lee

Click to expand...

Ok glad you checked. I would hate for us to try all sorts of things...and then have it all come back to an almost full hard drive.

Before you decide to do an OS reinstall (which usually is not necessary)...try repairing "Permissions"...with Disk Utility.

Also realize (depending on the amount of slowness you're experiencing) that your computer is on the older side...and that even though your hard drive is less than 1 year old...even a "new" hard drive can begin to fail unexpectedly (but it's rare).

Good luck,

- Nick

cheers for the info nick
have done a clean install seems to have done the trick as much better now
but have another problem now as it now doesn't recognize my back up disk when i plug it in dont know why as it did before it updated via update can any one advise what may be wrong
thanks in advance
nelo

Was this "backup drive" a 'Time Machine" backup?

- Nick