I am running Jaguar, and in the General preferences pane, the only option is to turn off Font Smoothing for fonts smaller than X, where X is a drop down menu with 8, 9, 10, and 12. I use a high resolution so I like to use larger font sizes, such as 14 or so. To turn off font smoothing for all size fonts you have to use TinkerTool, which is a 3rd party add in (ok, so it's not a "hack", but it certainly isn't part of the default Apple interface).
I would use Darwin except from time to time, I do enjoy having a second desktop handy, even if it is very slow. I am sure I could get a window manager to work with Darwin, and I could probably get ather apps as well, but as it is, the machine is fast enough for what I primarily use it for (mail/web/file serving).
It is on a base system
on
Is Mac OS X Slow?
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· Score: 2, Informative
I use a Beige G3 overclocked to 300MHz. Even overclocked it is very slow. At the stock speed (233MHz) it is unusable. I use Jaguar with a nice 40GB 7200RPM IBM drive, and 512MB of RAM. Using the builtin ATI Rage Pro video with 6MB of VRAM, Aqua makes this system crawl. I use the machine as a web/mail/file server and for those tasks is is quite fast. In fact, I bet it would run faster if I could disable the graphics entirely.
To show exactly how bad it is, I can open a terminal, make it full screen, cd to a full directory, and ls -la it. CPU utilization jumps to 100% and stays there while the list slowly scrolls by. I even used the hack to disable font antialiasing, but that provides no speed up. For terminal usage, it is faster for me to use Putty on my Windows box. The same directory listing via SSH, it *much* faster. So obviously the graphics system is the bottleneck in my system.
The solution to this would be to buy a decent video card, but you can't stick any old PCI VGA card in a Mac. First off the card needs a Mac boot ROM, then it needs to be supported by OS X, and you also need drivers. Of course "Mac Edition" ATI cards cost more than their PC counterparts, and the Radeon 7000 is the only modern ATI card available in PCI form. This all adds up to real frustration for OS X users stuck with older non-AGP Macs.
Overall I would recommend using OS X on a Beige G3 only if you intend to use it as a light duty server. For workstation or home use, you really have to have a modern Mac (~500MHz and up) to enjoy the user experience.
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I am running Jaguar, and in the General preferences pane, the only option is to turn off Font Smoothing for fonts smaller than X, where X is a drop down menu with 8, 9, 10, and 12. I use a high resolution so I like to use larger font sizes, such as 14 or so. To turn off font smoothing for all size fonts you have to use TinkerTool, which is a 3rd party add in (ok, so it's not a "hack", but it certainly isn't part of the default Apple interface).
I would use Darwin except from time to time, I do enjoy having a second desktop handy, even if it is very slow. I am sure I could get a window manager to work with Darwin, and I could probably get ather apps as well, but as it is, the machine is fast enough for what I primarily use it for (mail/web/file serving).
I use a Beige G3 overclocked to 300MHz. Even overclocked it is very slow. At the stock speed (233MHz) it is unusable. I use Jaguar with a nice 40GB 7200RPM IBM drive, and 512MB of RAM. Using the builtin ATI Rage Pro video with 6MB of VRAM, Aqua makes this system crawl. I use the machine as a web/mail/file server and for those tasks is is quite fast. In fact, I bet it would run faster if I could disable the graphics entirely.
To show exactly how bad it is, I can open a terminal, make it full screen, cd to a full directory, and ls -la it. CPU utilization jumps to 100% and stays there while the list slowly scrolls by. I even used the hack to disable font antialiasing, but that provides no speed up. For terminal usage, it is faster for me to use Putty on my Windows box. The same directory listing via SSH, it *much* faster. So obviously the graphics system is the bottleneck in my system.
The solution to this would be to buy a decent video card, but you can't stick any old PCI VGA card in a Mac. First off the card needs a Mac boot ROM, then it needs to be supported by OS X, and you also need drivers. Of course "Mac Edition" ATI cards cost more than their PC counterparts, and the Radeon 7000 is the only modern ATI card available in PCI form. This all adds up to real frustration for OS X users stuck with older non-AGP Macs.
Overall I would recommend using OS X on a Beige G3 only if you intend to use it as a light duty server. For workstation or home use, you really have to have a modern Mac (~500MHz and up) to enjoy the user experience.