Logo Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

Mach OS X

Mach OS X

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

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The spinning rainbow beachball is not our friend. When we see it on our Macs, we don’t think warm thoughts. We don’t greet it. In fact, we wish it would just go away.

With OS X 10.4, you’d think there’s be a tiger in your tank by now. It’s definitely faster than Panther – OS X 10.3 – and if you have a G5 or one of the latest iBooks and PowerBooks, it’s definitely no slouch. But if you’ve had your Mac a while, you’ll have a G3 or a sub-1GHz G4 processor and, at times, Tiger still won’t leap into action any faster than an Action Man with the batteries taken out.

However, all is not lost: you needn’t sacrifice your Mac to the great god eBay just yet. Over the next few pages, we’ll give you more than a few hints that should help you get your Mac doing more new tricks than an old dog has any right to. And if you have a new Mac, read on, too: there’s always room for improvement.

First off, a few hardware basics. Dull, dull, dull, we know, but no pain, no gain. Your Mac’s processor, whether it’s a G3, G4 or G5, processes instructions. These instructions come from your programs and from OS X itself. For your Mac to run OS X and your programs as quickly as possible, your processor needs to get those instructions as quickly as possible. Their location will therefore affect your Mac’s speed a great deal.

The fastest location of all is the “cache” on the processors, followed your Mac’s memory, its hard drive, removable disks, servers on a network and then things on the Internet such as your iDisk.

Your processors’ caches only have about 1MB of storage at most, which makes memory the best place for data. When you launch your Mac, the first thing it will do is copy all the vital and necessary parts of OS X from your hard drive into its memory. When you launch an application, it will do the same thing. If you don’t have enough memory, your Mac will use your hard drive, swapping the things it needs for things it doesn’t need. This whole process takes time and your hard drive is many, many times slower than memory so you really want to avoid this if possible.

So the number one best thing you can do for your Mac is buy it more memory. As an improvement, it’s relatively cheap since you get an excellent amount for just £60. With Tiger, the crucial level is about 512MB of RAM. That gives you enough room for Tiger itself and to run a few programs simultaneously. Up it further to 768MB for greater comfort. If you have a G5-based Mac, however, we’d recommend 768MB as a basic level and 1GB for comfort. Why do you need more for a G5? The G5, as Apple likes to brag, is a 64-bit chip, while the G4 and G3 are both 32-bit chips. That means that the G5 can attack data twice as quickly, but it also means that all the instructions take up more space than their 32-bit equivalents.

Fortunately, one of the expansion options available to just about every Mac – with the exception of the Mini – is to add more memory. Your Mac’s user guide will almost certainly have detailed instructions on how to add memory to it and it’s by no means a difficult operation. There also online guides in Apple’s online support section (http://www.apple.com/support). Sure, it’ll terrify you something chronic initially, but after the first time, you’ll have a new air of confidence, a swagger to your walk and the ability to fearlessly pluck the top off anyone’s Mac at a moment’s notice. We wouldn’t recommend that, though.

The best place to buy RAM is absolutely not Apple. We say this not because we’re a mischievous bunch, honest, but because its prices are pretty steep. At the time of writing, Apple is willing to add 512MB of RAM to a new iMac for a seemingly reasonable price of £60 or so. For the same money, you can get 1GB of RAM from Crucial, say (http://www.crucial.com/uk/mac/index.asp). That’s right: Apple has a “one for the price of two” offer running at its store.

In general, actually, we’d recommend Crucial for memory upgrades over most suppliers – and not because we have shares in them (we don’t). They’re cheaper than many, yet have good reliable memory. They’re not completely PC-oriented. And they have a handy online guide to tell you which memory chips you’ll need: tell them you have an Apple iBook G4 1.2GHz and Crucial will correctly report back you need a 200-pin SODIMM. Sounds like gobbledygook, doesn’t it, so do not, under any circumstances, try to guess what kind of memory your Mac needs: you will be wrong. You won’t damage your Mac by ordering it, since you won’t be able to fit the memory without bending it into a new shape, but you will waste time and money – and potentially order slower memory than is helpful. Rely on Apple’s support site or Crucial’s memory advisor.

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.

It gets harder after this, since you have identify which programs you want to kill off. The best way to approach the problem is to quit all the programs you’re using except for Activity Monitor. You can then use that to work out for yourself what you’re running and quit anything you know you don’t want. A quick scan through might reveal for instance that you’re running “ipfwloggerd”. If you just happen to know that stands for “IP firewall logger daemon”, all well and good – either kill it off or go into your “Firewall” preferences and turn off Firewall logging. But if you don’t know what it does, leave it alone.

Once you’re done, work your way through the System Preferences, going through each option in turn and asking yourself the following question: “Does this option make my Mac do more work?” Does it take any more effort for the Mac to run using French menus? No. To use Californian time instead of London? No. Does it take effort to display an icon, such as the time or AirPort status, in the menubar? Yes. Does it take effort to log things? Yes. Once you’ve identified something that takes effort, decide whether you need to use it; if you don’t, turn it off.

Controls for third-party programs such as Default Folder, Version Cue, and Stuffit Deluxe will often appear here and you can use them to configure whether these programs or some of their extra features should run or not.

Pay very close attention to the Login items pane of the Accounts section. When your Mac logs you in, it will run all the programs listed here. If there’s something you’ve installed but don’t want any more, delete it from the list to prevent it launching at start up.

There are two other ways for items to launch themselves at start-up in Tiger. The first uses special files designed to work with launchd itself. These are located in the “Library” folders under “LaunchAgents” and “LaunchDaemons”. If you want to find out what they do, use Lingon (free, http://lingon.sourceforge.net/) to analyse the commands each file gives launchd.

The second way, a left over from Panther and earlier, is the “StartupItems” folder in the main “Library” folder. This contains items designed to run programs and Unix commands at start-up. Usually, they have descriptive titles, making it easy for you to know what they launch and whether you want them: common, self-explanatory items include “AdobeVersionCueCS2”, “RetroRun” (used by Retrospect), and “MissingSyncMounting”, although there are many others. If they look redundant, simply drag them to the Trash to stop them running next time you start up.

There are two major Tiger functions that hog memory, processor time and hard drive access: these are Dashboard and Spotlight. You’ll find your Mac will often slow down considerably soon after you’ve launched Dashboard for the first time. If you look at Activity Monitor, you’ll see the reason why. Even with Dashboard out the way, its widgets still run and each will typically consume about 8MB of memory and some CPU time as well. The more powerful widgets, such as radio players and others that load Internet plug-ins, can consume twice that, easily. Pruning down the number of widgets you use can speed up Tiger. If you like your widgets the way they are, though, use Activity Monitor or the Terminal command “killall Dock” to quit the Dock, which is the “parent” of all the Dashboard widgets when you’re done. The Dock will restart afterwards but Dashboard won’t until the next time you launch it.

Spotlight is another resource-hogger. As well as taking up processing time, it accesses the hard drive almost continuously, reading updated documents and adding them to its index. Spotlight can’t deal with databases of files, only individual files, and it only understands a limited number of file formats. Throw it a Microsoft Entourage database, a FileMaker Pro file or anything else that’s large and gets updated frequently and it will constantly try to process that database in its entirety each and every time.

You can stop Spotlight being such a menace by restricting which files it indexes or turning it off completely. The first option is easier, since you only need use the “Privacy” tab in the Spotlight System Preferences pane. Just drag folders to which you never add data onto the pane and Spotlight will stop indexing them. Similarly, dragging your “Microsoft User Data” folder, which you can find in your “Documents” folder, will stop Entourage’s database from getting a thorough going over.

Turning off Spotlight altogether is not without its hazards. All sorts of Tiger programs rely on Spotlight for the find functions, including Mail. But if you’re sure you want to, the shareware program Spotless ($7.95, http://www.fixamacsoftware.com/software/spot/) gives you a graphical way to manage or deactivate Spotlight (see walkthrough three).

There is also software to improve hard drive performance. OS X stops disk fragmentation, for instance, a common problem on Windows machines that slows down just about everything. It also has a caching system designed to do just that, but this doesn’t always produce the best results. Programs such as Tiger Cache Cleaner ($9.90, http://www.northernsoftworks.com/tigercachecleaner.html) can increased the cache of files that OS X stores in memory. This can be very useful if you have plenty of memory and there are certain files – OS X’s or your own – that get accessed frequently. Many applications, including Internet Explorer, also have caches that perform similar tasks so if they give you the option of increasing cache sizes, take advantage of them.

Disk journaling, a nice feature designed to avoid disk corruption in the event of your Mac crashing, does reduce disk performance slightly. If your Mac is particularly reliable, use the Terminal command “sudo diskutil disableJournal /Volume/diskName”, to disable journaling on drive “diskName” – you can just drag the drive onto your Terminal window to make this last past magically appear without any typing.

Our last hard drive turbo tip is to use Disk Utility to repair permissions on your startup drive. As well as fixing all sorts of common problems, this can improve performance as OS X no longer has to work out what to do when applications start trying to access things they should be able to but can’t.

There is one final turbo tip though. We’ve covered all the real ways you can speed up your Mac but if you can’t speed up your Mac any further, speed up your Internet connection instead. Most of the waiting you’ll face in Safari, for instance, comes from the speed you can get data down your Internet connection. Faster Internet=faster Mac (seemingly). If you have an Internet connection that’s 5Mbps or better, Apple’s Broadband Tuner (http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/broadbandtuner10.html) can make it even faster. And if your Open and Save dialogue boxes seem a bit slow, turn off iDisk syncing.

On older Macs, OS X 10.4 may not run as well as it should. If you follow our advice, though, Tiger can be… great! (Sorry. We just had to.)

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