powermac g5 questions?

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Hi, i just bought powermac g5 1.8 ghz 4 gb ram with a 10k rpm hard drive.

with those specs alone i thought this system will perform quite fast, but my dell inspiron 6000 LAPTOP with 1.6 ghz 700 fsb 1 gb ram 7400 rpm hard drive performs much faster and smoother then the powermac? can someone explain to me why this is happening? Is it something with the MAC or is it just mine? I've never had a MAC before this one so i have no clue. any help is appreciated. thanks
 
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Power Mac dual G5
I don't see any reason why a G5 PowerMac should get blown away by a 1.6 GHz Pentium M. You might have a problem with OS X slowing it down.
 
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More details are needed. What are you doing? What is really slow? (Load times, first boot, etc...) What version of OS X are you running?
A PowerMac G5 with 4GB RAM and a 10k HD sounds fast and all until I read it is only a 1.8GHz which was the first G5 made. It may have still cost you an arm and a leg but it's still a 4 year old computer. It may not be super fast to today's standards anymore but it should be marginally faster than the laptop.
 
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load time for software, particularly illustrator and just the way illustrator is running in general. im running MAC OSX 10.4.1. could that be an issue?

Also for a 10k rpm hard drive my boot up isn't as fast as thought it would be as well. this switch over to MAC is really annoying me, i thought i bought a pretty fast system, but my laptop handles alot better in general then this powermac.
 
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Possibly updating to 10.4.10 might help. But you are comparing a 1.8GHz system to a 1.6GHz system. The difference in processor speeds is so insignificant. 4GB RAM won't help in anyway if you only use 1GB with Illustrator. The extra 3GB won't make the computer run faster. The 10k HD should make load times faster though.
How long is your boot time? Seriously, I want you to power it on and use the stopwatch feature on your phone or something.
Download menu meters or istat pro. How much of your processor and RAM is being used at idle? while using Illustrator? while internet surfing?
 
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First rule of thumb when buying a system, especially a used one, is to reinstall the OS from scratch. You never know what crud someone else had on the box.

As for Illustrator, is the version you are running on OS X a native OS X app or is an an older version meant to run under OS 9. Second, how does it perform the tasks it needs to. Take the same file and process it on both systems.

Also, is that Mac a dual processor system or single. Is the Dell processor a single or dual.
 
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First rule of thumb when buying a system, especially a used one, is to reinstall the OS from scratch. You never know what crud someone else had on the box.

Agreed. I figured sinced he had a 10k HD, he installed it himself and loaded Tiger.
 
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thanks for the replies guys. yeah i did do a fresh install of mac os 10.4

the load time for illustrator is almost 3 minutes using about 300 mb of the available 1 gig for the program. how can I adjust illustrator to use more ram then its using? i already went into the preference of illustrator with no such luck.....
 

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