Mach OS X
- Article 53 of 53
- iCreate, March 2006
OS X 10.4 is Apple's fastest system yet, but older Macs might not be getting the full benefit of Apple's latest tune-up. Here we explain how to turbocharge Tiger
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages
Other hardware improvements that you might want to consider, depending on the Mac you have, include processor upgrades and faster hard drives. Certain Macs, usually Power Macs but there are others, can have their processors replaced with faster chips, which of course will speed up your Mac no end. There’s a wealth of options for Quicksilver G4s and Cubes although they’ll never make it into the G5 leagues. The best place to find out what your Mac’s processor upgrade options are is http://www.xlr8yourmac.com/cpucards.html. Prices range from about £70, so you can pick up a bargain in some cases.
A faster hard drive will also give overall improvements. There are two things that can make a hard drive quicker: a faster rotation rate and a faster interface. Drives in older desktop Macs, laptops and Mac Minis work at only 4800rpm. Buying a 7200rpm hard drive will increase considerably the rate at which you can read and write to your hard drive. Unfortunately, these faster hard drives also generate extra heat which makes them incompatible for use internally with most Macs. But you can buy an external drive that runs at 7200rpm, install Tiger onto that, copy over your data and then use that as a start-up disk.
Another good use for a second hard drive is RAID 0. This makes two or more hard drives appear like one hard drive so you can read and write to them simultaneously. Disk Utility in Tiger makes it very easy to set up a RAID array (see walkthrough one) with just a few button clicks.
This trick of spreading data between drives also works in other ways. Storing your Applications, data or home folder (see walkthrough two) on a separate drive to your start-up disk will all give various degrees of speed improvement, as well as freeing more space on your main drive.
You’ll be limited to some extent by the age and Pro status of your Mac as to what kind of hard drive interface you can use. The Mac’s internal interface is the fastest option, so if you have a spare bay or feel like replacing the internal drive you already have, use that. Of the external options, FireWire 800 is the fastest, followed by regular FireWire then USB 2.0. USB 2.0 drives are the cheapest, however, and are not much slower than FireWire so don’t be ashamed if that’s the best option you can find for your budget.
However, be absolutely sure you have USB 2.0 or FireWire 800 first. The best way to find out what you have is to use System Profiler in the Utilities folder. It’s possible for you to buy upgrade cards for Power Macs and bigger laptops that will provide USB 2.0 and FireWire 800 capabilities. USB 2.0 cards cost about £10, while FireWire 800 and PCMCIA cards come at about £50.
While hardware improvements will give you the biggest speed improvements with Tiger, they also cost money. But software, which tends to be cheaper or free, can also make things run faster.
Software improvements come in two varieties: those that reduce the number of programs using your Mac’s processor; and those that improve the way your Mac uses its hard drive.
At any one time, your Mac is running numerous programs without your knowing it. OS X is not simply one big program: it is a collection of smaller programs all working together to give you the OS X experience. To have a look at these programs, open up Activity Monitor and set it to show “All Processes, Hierarchically” using the menu at the top. Process 0 is the “kernel_task”, which runs everything. After that comes “launchd” which is new to Tiger and controls the launching of everything else on your Mac. Then there’s a whole series of “child” processes launched by launchd, including all your programs. So the trick is to reduce the number of these programs.
A quick and easy first win here is to reduce the number of icons on your desktop. Seriously. Each icon counts as a window and will hog a window’s worth of memory and processor time. If you have dozens of icons on your desktop, putting them all in one folder may give you a surprising speed boost.
Page 1 | Page 2 | Page 3 | Page 4 | All 4 Pages