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Not enough RAM for one. And make certain you have at least 10% of your boot drive empty. That would be 15 GB.

You are running minimum RAM on that machine for Leopard. 2GB would be sufficient.

Well, your Mac is ancient. That G4 was top of the line in January of 2002, which honestly was NOT one of the highpoints in Apple history. Anyhooz, it's a nearly 8 year old computer. Sorry, but it's just not going to keep up with modern tasks.

That said, you're on the right track. My old iBook 1.0 GHz will barely play youtube videos unless I quit every open app and every other window in Firefox. You've maxed the RAM, so you've got that going for ya. My only other suggestion would be to open up Activity Monitor and see what other processes are running that might be sucking up processor cycles.

I would downgrade to Panther.

Thanks for the responses everyone, I'll try the Tiger out and see if that helps. At some point I'll upgrade to a G5...just trying to put it off a while longer yet.

I would really skip the g5 all together and shoot for an intel.

ukimalefu wrote:

mrreet2001 wrote:

I would really skip the g5 all together and shoot for an intel.

Indeed.

Double-true.

it's a G Mac.

i have a G5 powermac with the best card you can stick in it.
and for some things, games being one of em.. it's slow.
it's a 1.8 dual processor... 3G of Ram and an ATI x800xt 512M video card.
runs Tiger.
and it just doesn't cut it.
besides.. SL = EOL for G models.

you want to enjoy the faster things, i highly recommend you do NOT buy anything with a G in it for processor.
hell, the Intels have been around for enough years to gets some steals on one if you wish.

sworaz wrote:

That's what doesn't make sense....there isn't enough ram to have one single internet explorer window open playing a game?

When you say internet explorer window are you are referring to a browser window like Safari or Firefox or an actual Internet Explorer window, because Internet Explorer hasn't been updated in I don't know how many years, which would add to poor flash performance.

I have a QuickSilver 933 G4 too, with Tiger 10.4.11, 1.5 MB RAM and it ran fine for many years, and still does. I used multiple web browsers with no problems.

My QS G4 runs OK under Tiger, but I don't do heavy-duty, multimedia intensive operations anymore (like Flash or gaming) since I also got a Mac Pro for that – the QS G4 is a secondary CPU for me now. Maybe Leopard is not the best OS for it, I've never tried it on the QS G4.

With yours, there could be speed issues with Flash, as others have pointed out. Flash just wants a lot of processing power in general. And they usually build software around the current hardware – not 7 year old hardware. In that case, you need to get a faster machine. Possibly it would run faster with Tiger instead of Leopard, too.

Personally, I don't always think it's a good idea to run the most current OS on machines that are that many years older than the OS, even if you CAN boot it, the lack of good performance is still an issue.

Do most applications on your computer besides Flash and gaming generally work OK, otherwise? That would be telling. Might just be best to move on, since you're set on doing processor intensive stuff anyway.

FYI, 1.5 GB RAM is the highest you can go (3, 512 MB SDRAMs) on the QS G4.

Last edited by adamjg (2009-10-03 9:52 pm)