New to the Apple and the Mac OS X

redimpulse

I recently obtained a PowerBook G4. 667 MHz, 512 Mb PC-133, 30 Gb HDD. When I got it, it had no OS, but it now has OS X 10.4.10. I had tried with earlier versions (10.1, 10.3) and have found that this one is the most powerful and resource friendly. That's fine.

My problem is this: The machine itself is pretty powerful, enough for what I need. But FireFox runs really slow and the font size is a little big for what I'm used to. Is there another OS X browser that'll provide the same functionality (tabbed browsing, simple interface, browser and tab session restore) that would work better on this system? Also, how do I change default font sizes? Browsing the forums is a pain in the ass because what normally takes 1 page to me now is about 2.5. Also I could use a media player that has good support of .wmv and .asf files.

Also does anyone know any tricks to squeezing more power out of this laptop? I know I could upgrade the RAM, but even now it seems that 512 sticks of PC-133 notebook is pretty pricey.

Silvoculous

As for browsers, there's Camino (by the same people who made Firefox) and Shiira. Google 'em both.

LoneIgadzra

I use Safari 3 beta. Sessions restore is only manual, but I've found it to be the fastest OS X browser on old hardware. I don't know why people immediately ditch it for the ever-shitty Mac version of Firefox. Camino is okay, uses the Firefox rendering engine and is pretty lightweight, but bogs down ridiculously with more complicated pages on old hardware.

Basically, you make it go fast by only doing one or two things at a time, and not running extra stuff like Quicksilver or Shapeshifter. Sometimes on older hardware more icons in the desktop can slow it down.

ben0207

We have a Mac thread in the T part of GnT full of helpful friendly people.

Well, usually it's just me, but whatever.


As for browsers, the builtin Safari has everything you want, but Camino is better if you don't use iWeb (which is tied to Safari) or need a FF specific add-on.

For WMV you need Flip4Mac, which google will help with, and I've never used an ASF file ut I assume VLC can deal with it

And as for getting it to be abit faster? Well, for one thing it will eb atad slow for a day or two while Spotlight get its shit together but assuming you have 512 Ram there's not too much I can suggest (disabling Dashboard is a nice idea, but you might one day want it, so YMM)

FF

If you can afford it I'd say get more RAM. OS X loves RAM. I've got 10.4.8 on my little 500MHz G3 iBook and it's still quite serviceable, the trick is that it has the most RAM I could find for it. (768MB or something along those lines). It does load the forums fairly slowly but I'm also on a slow connection.

Also check what your power settings are at. If you've got the machine plugged in, make sure that your power settings are set for 'Better Performance' and not 'Better Battery Life'.

joshmunkey

there are PPC specific builds of firefox and camino (which i recommend higher than firefox) available that reduce the universal binary load as well as other small things, leaving a smaller footprint on older machines

http://www.rpm-mozilla.org.uk/

redimpulse

Cool, I'll check out those specific builds. Also the battery only lasts 4.2 minutes, so I've got it set on plugged in - better performance.

Can anyone tell me if the font size options can be adjusted? That's probably what is getting me the most.

ben0207

redimpulse wrote: »

Cool, I'll check out those specific builds. Also the battery only lasts 4.2 minutes, so I've got it set on plugged in - better performance.

Can anyone tell me if the font size options can be adjusted? That's probably what is getting me the most.

All over the system?

Brodo Faggins

System Preferences -> Appearance -> I like turning off text smoothing for font sizes 12 and smaller (all the way at the bottom). That should help with some of the way fonts sometimes look in the OS.

redimpulse

ben0207 wrote: »

redimpulse wrote: »

Cool, I'll check out those specific builds. Also the battery only lasts 4.2 minutes, so I've got it set on plugged in - better performance.

Can anyone tell me if the font size options can be adjusted? That's probably what is getting me the most.

All over the system?

No, just mainly browsing. Firefox doesn't have this feature (that I could find). But I downloaded one of those Camino builds and it has font customization. So I guess that about does it for the issues I had.

Now to save up and buy a couple 512 sticks and get this thing really moving.

DeathPrawn

In Firefox (and a lot of other OSX programs), pressing Cmd-'-' (command/apple and minus) at the same time shrinks the font size. Similarly, Cmd-+ (cmd and plus) grows it.