very slow mac :(

hello
i have a G4 mini, and a macbook pro CD.

my mini has been a great little computer for a couple of years now, but recently has been really grinding.

since purchasing my macbook pro, i have moved all of my personal information over to it from my mini, and now want to run it exclusively as a music server for my network and an internet/email machine (for when my macbook is off). i deleted all the programs and files from the mini i would no longer need, and ran the basic maintance scripts. i have moved my iTunes music folder from an external to the mini's HD, which has left the 80GB HD with over 6GB free.

i want to restore the performance i used to get when it was new. how should i go about doing this? is there any programs i can use eg Disk Warrior 4, that will clean it up, or is a fresh format and keep at least 10% free space the better option. this will mean, time to backup and reformat, reupdating OSX, and culling of music, as i don't want to run an external holding my music.

cheers

Sounds like you have done all the basic stuff, maintenance scripts, freeing disk space and so on. A fresh install might be what you need.

Here is my usual recipe for tuning up a slowing Mac. You would seem to have done all the key things already, but just in case it might help, here is the full monty (the CPU process hunting part below *might* apply to you):

First, check that your processor is running full speed. Go to Preferences, Energy Saver, Options and look at the drop box down near the bottom called Processor Performance. If it is not set to "Highest", set it to that right away. This maximizes performance, but for notebooks, it may run down the battery faster. Note that not all Macs have this setting - laptops do, and my certainly my PowerMac G5 tower does, but not all Macs do.

Next, download OnyX and run the complete set of clean up and maintenance scripts and then evaluate again. Get OnyX at:

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

Next, you may wish to check that you have enough free space on your hard drive. Highlight the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop, CTL-click it and select Get Info from the resulting menu. Make sure you have a reasonable amount of space left. If not, a little spring cleaning may be in order.

There are two excellent apps for showing where all of your hard disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X and WhatSize. Get them at:

Disk Inventory X: http://www.derlien.com

WhatSize: http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize

Both do a great job at letting you zero in on your largest disk space consumers, so that you can hunt down any rogue files (and both are freeware, which is good).

Finally, it is possible you may have some processes running that are consuming a lot of idle CPU, thus slowing down your machine overall. I had a bad widget that did this once. Open Activity Monitor and look at your "resting" CPU occupancy when you are not doing anything in particular with the machine. It should be pretty much zero (maybe 1% to 2% at most). If it not, identify the process or processes that are taking the time. What are they? Do you recognize them? Are they needed?

If you find one that is not needed, kill it and see how your machine starts to behave. If this is the cure, you will need to identify the startup item that launches it and delete it.

So, in summary then, take the following steps in order:
1/ Start with ensuring that your processor speed setting is full (applies to many Macs but not all)
2/ Then do Onyx based full maintenance
3/ Then check that you have sufficient available disk space
4/ Finally, search for processes that are consuming an unexpected amount of CPU

thanks for your help mac57

i ended up just doing a reformat, as the other method didnt seem to help me out. im going to limit data i return to the hd, so i hopefully will have a blazing fast G4 mini again for some time

it was probly my best option, as i wanted to get rid of a lot of extras i had installed to strip it back to a basic machine.

cheers
rhys