Quicksilver with os 10.4
 

Hi all,

I have a quicksilver 800 Mhz with 768 ram and Os 10.4.11 installed. Well, the machine is really slow. I´ve seen many threads here and other places saying that this machine should run fine with Tiger. Looking a bit the Activity monitor, the cpu usage is almost always at 100% even if i have only Firefox and Preview open and i move the preview window the cpu usage goes to 100%. In ram usage, the 50% is almost always free, no problem there. Do you think this is normal? A fresh installation maybe? A downgrade to 10.3?

Thank you

Has it always been like this since installing Tiger?

1. Try a brand new user account. If this is faster, then the problem is in the Library folder of your old user account. Possibly a cache that needs deleting.

2. Check Activity Monitor and see what particular processes are causing the high CPU usage.

3. A Fresh install is really only a solution if you have added loads of third-party software that has installed things all over your system, or if you have deleted or modified system components yourself.

Thank you benwiggy for the reply. I bought the computer used with the system installed. I did make a new admin account. In activity monitor i can see that preview for example with a pdf open consumes all the cpu power if i resize the window. Acrobat reader is out of question, as i have to wait even to scroll a page and consumes all the cpu power as well.
One strange thing about the installation is that it has the Classic 9 option. I don´t know if this could be relevant.

Thank you again

Did you get system disks with the computer? Ideally, you should do a fresh install when you buy a second-hand Mac, as you don't know what state it's in.
In Activity Monitor, does Preview's process itself take a high CPU %..?

There's nothing odd about Classic being on a system like that. Is Classic running at the moment? There'll be a 9 icon in the Dock and in the menu bar.

Launch Console in the Utilities folder. See if any log messages give any clue to the high CPU %.

Thank you benwiggy. I will check the console when i got home. I´ve never opened it. Good to know. I think i´m going to do a fresh install to see if this solves the problem.
I believe there should be a solution, something should be wrong cause i have a g4 @ 400 Mhz too and with 10.3 works like a charm.

I´ll post back if i find something interesting.

Hi again,

Well, in the console there is nothing relative to the CPU. What i found out though, is that having only Firefox open using gtalk it consumes 40% to 60% of the CPU power which is a lot. Other apps like pure data do the same, so its not a problem of the specific app. This seems really strange to me. I am out of troubleshooting ideas.

If your quicksilver 800 only has one processor it's going to be slow. If you have two processors then constant 100 percent processor use doesn't seem normal to me.

Thank you Mclbruce. So a downgrade to 10.3 seems the only possible solution as long as its almost impossible to work with this computer.

I strongly disagree.

There is NO reason that a PowerMac G4/800 Quicksilver shouldn't run OS X 10.4.x very nicely indeed, whether it has one processor or two. And getting constant 100% processor use means that you're running something that you shouldn't be, typically a system hack, 'haxie', third party menubar item, plugin for Safari, iChat, Mail, (which are actually InputManagers, a very bad hack) etc.

What Firefox plugins are you running exactly?

Does this problem happen when you don't use Firefox? (I still think that you're using a system hack of some kind.)

If you don't know what you're doing that caused this, then I would indeed recommend an Archive and Install of OS X 10.4.x. I would NOT recommend going back to OS X 10.3.x.

Trevor

I agree with all of the above. On second thought, 100 percent activity, even with one processor, is not normal. Something has to be causing it. I've never recommended anyone downgrade from 10.4 to 10.3, no matter what computer they have.

That's more than what I would expect. A little slow, but usable is what I would expect.

Thanks a lot guys!
These posts made me search more thoroughly (and a bit happier too). First of all the computer has one processor.
Looking in the plugins i disabled a plugin called Gecko default plugin which made firefox to consume 20% to 40% of the cpu power!
Another really strange thing is that a top reveals 80 processes running (which does not show on Activity monitor). Well, i´ve never seen a mac running 80 processes after reboot.

I do not have the installation disks yet, so till i get them i´ll try to see what these processes are, kill them one by one to see if there is any good results.

Thank again for your time.

If you open Activity Monitor, change the Show dropdown to All Processes (not just My Processes), you should see all 80, or very close to that amount.
Click on the CPU headed to sort by CPU usage. You should be able to quickly see what is dragging your system down.

Thank you DeltaMac
Unfortunately nothing. The processes are there but non of them consumes power (2 or 3% very few of them). After rebooting the system i start only acrobat reader and constantly resizing the window consumes 80% and its very choppy. Firefox when resizing constantly is choppy too and consumes 70%. Pure data when calculates audio takes 70%.
Ok i´ll do the fresh installation to see the results. A faulty hardware part does not seem that impossible to me.

Hi all,

Even if a bit late, i did a fresh install of Tiger. The problem is still there. I have installed only Firefox and PureData after the installation. I did repair the permissions and i have completely disabled the widgets. Moreover i have disabled the animation effects sending windows to the dock. If i just open Firefox and PureData without using them and try to access the dock, its animation is really choppy.

The scenario of a faulty hardware is highly unlikely because I installed Linux (Ubuntu) in my second internal HD and it runs just fine.

Well, i don´t know but it seems to me there nothing left to do. Does anyone have any other idea? Maybe maximum ram upgrade would improve the performance.

Thank you

You might look at your video card. Go into System Profiler (Hold Option while pulling down the Apple menu) and check your Graphics/Displays. If you still have the original ATI Rage 128, there are no good drivers for it in Tiger. I'd recommend upgrading the card to the very least an ATI Radeon 32M or NVidia GForce anything. You can often find these used cards very inexpensive on Ebay.

Thank you Las Vegas, The video card is an ATI RV200 VRam 32Mb. Do you think this could cause the problem?

Sorry, I missed the title. The card is an ATI Radeon 7500. Then says Rv200...

The Radeon 7500 is a fine card, and should not be the cause of any slowdowns. Unlike the Rage series that Las_Vegas mentions above, the Radeons have good drivers in OS X.

(Which is not to say that you couldn't speed things up with a newer card, just that the Radeon 7500 isn't notably slow or anything.)

Trevor

Thank you Trevor. Another thing that happens is that even if i have put as time zone GMT+1 the clock shows wrong time. Is there such thing as cmos battery in Apple computers. Is this a possible cause?

Yes, there is a PRAM battery on the Quicksilver's motherboard that can go dead. I can't imagine a mechanism that would cause a dead PRAM battery to cause a slowdown in the operating system, but it's certainly a good idea to replace that battery anyway.

So in short, I don't think it's THE problem, but it is A problem that you should fix.

You can buy a new battery here, for just one example. It's a 3.6 volt 1/2 AA Lithium battery.

In the diagram below, you can see the location of the PRAM battery on your motherboard in the lower right corner.

http://img142.imageshack.us/img142/9...logicbd8aa.jpg

It's very easy to replace, just turn off your computer and open up your Quicksilver's side, pop out the old battery and replace it with the new one.

Trevor

Thank you very much Trevor. I will change the battery first, just in case. Then i will try to use the computer as much as possible so as to see if i can isolate the problem.