How can this be?

Hey all, first time here, extremely informative!

First of all, I just purchased a very clean and well maintained PPC,1.67ghz. 17' Powerbook G4 from a friend who was it's only owner. I'll go ahead and tell you that I paid $350 for it which after looking around CL for a day or so, that is a fair price for where I live. Besides, he needed it and has been a good friend for a number of years, win + win. It has all the disks including OS 9 and it included CS2 and it is literally in "as new" condition. It is my second one, my first gave up the ghost in a bicycle crash 4 years ago and I have been on a number of windows machines since and have never considered myself an Apple Aficionado.

So How is it that this stunningly beautiful but 88 month old G4, with merely 512megs of RAM can seriously beat beat my windows machine sporting a dual core 2ghz processors and 4gigs of ram? I just don't understand it. My windows machine lags and hangs and takes forever to boot and shut down where the G4 is much more quick and responsive with hardly any beach balls. Why is this? Other than the video streaming being choppy, it's by far a better machine all the way around.

So again, how can this be? And will another 1.5 gigs of ram give me noticeable improvements?

Thanks so much!

Zekethedego said:

Hey all, first time here, extremely informative!

First of all, I just purchased a very clean and well maintained PPC,1.67ghz. 17' Powerbook G4 from a friend who was it's only owner. I'll go ahead and tell you that I paid $350 for it which after looking around CL for a day or so, that is a fair price for where I live. Besides, he needed it and has been a good friend for a number of years, win + win. It has all the disks including OS 9 and it included CS2 and it is literally in "as new" condition. It is my second one, my first gave up the ghost in a bicycle crash 4 years ago and I have been on a number of windows machines since and have never considered myself an Apple Aficionado.

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$350 is top of the mark for a machine of that vintage, in my opinion. But glad you could help out a friend.

So How is it that this stunningly beautiful but 88 month old G4, with merely 512megs of RAM can seriously beat beat my windows machine sporting a dual core 2ghz processors and 4gigs of ram? I just don't understand it. My windows machine lags and hangs and takes forever to boot and shut down where the G4 is much more quick and responsive with hardly any beach balls. Why is this?

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Hard to say, but generally speaking, your Windows boxes will run some flavor of bloated, inefficient, nannying and interuptive anti virus/security software. And if it's like most Windows machines, it probably has some malware/adware/spyware running the background. A better comparison would be with a clean install of Windows and nothing else.

Other than the video streaming being choppy, it's by far a better machine all the way around.

So again, how can this be? And will another 1.5 gigs of ram give me noticeable improvements?

Thanks so much!

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I'm not sure. It really depends on the video streaming - if it's Flash, then that's your issue. Adobe has pretty much ended development for the PPC version of Flash. If you have Leopard running on it (10.5), then 512MB is going to be a major hindrance to that machine, you definitely want all the memory it will take (2GB, I think).

mostly because it's well maintained would probably be a lot of it. You should ask your friend what he used to do for maintenance as that would be a good start. But still even a 'not' well maintained mac possibly could work better than a Win/loss machines and thier programs tend to take a bit of the 'scenic' route, a lot of that having to do with the registry (especially if it isn't cleaned and has unused code in it - actually that goes with a lot of coding and programming that windows has) and orpaned dlls etc. But even with years of not reinstalling and getting rid of orphans etc on my 2006 mini, it's still pretty smoot. I just reinstalled my OS the other day because sometimes that is the best way to get rid of the 'maybe I'll need this one day' and the 1000s of emails I just didn't permanently delete lol - I can say it was more of a matter of seeing the build up or even just knowing that it's there rather then with a win/loss machine where you see and hear it... I can also say that mac machines follow the "Seen but not heard" adage more then a win/loss machine does.

In that sense, when you clean out a Win machine, you know that you've done it as there usually is a huge performance difference (this includes hardware sometimes too). I don't use the intensive programs so the difference is negligable in most programs. For these reasons alone I would rather be clueless on a mac than seeing the difference after a weekly cleaning and 10 or more MS Windows updates alone per week..

I'll aslo add maybe because of the flash and other old programming, you should keep a CCC copy of your HD too if it's possible the download as I'm not sure how long they will even keep it available. Ohh I do miss some of the old OS 9 days. FYI I can't remember the name at the moment but there is a site that maintains a lot of old games etc for OS 9.

Thanks very much to you all for the advice. I'm running Tiger, 10.4 on it as that's what he had on it and I believe that is the latest OSX I can run on a PPC machine. I still have my old external 500gig HDD that I'm going to plug into her today and see what pops up, do a backup and list my windows machine for sale. My GF has a Macbook Pro and I told her that one of those for me would be a sweet birthday present next month. She's like "Yeah right, I'm sure it would"...

Question though, what is a CCC copy of my HD? Just a backup or is there more to it?

Thanks!

Zekethedego said:

Thanks very much to you all for the advice. I'm running Tiger, 10.4 on it as that's what he had on it and I believe that is the latest OSX I can run on a PPC machine.

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You can actually run Leopard (10.5). Anything newer than that is Intel-only.

I still have my old external 500gig HDD that I'm going to plug into her today and see what pops up, do a backup and list my windows machine for sale. My GF has a Macbook Pro and I told her that one of those for me would be a sweet birthday present next month. She's like "Yeah right, I'm sure it would"...

Question though, what is a CCC copy of my HD? Just a backup or is there more to it?

Thanks!

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CCC = CarbonCopyCloner. Yes, it's a way of cloning the HDD. I personally prefer SuperDuper!.

Okay thanks, I will check both of them out. This is a really great place!