My G4 is running slow. Check my plan please.

Jim Brennan

Jim Brennan

VHS Member Old Skool
My trusty old 800mhz G4 Quicksilver is really running slow. I do my regular maintenance (repair permissions, Disc Warrior), but I think it's just getting cluttered.

I primarily use it for internet and documents/budgets/scheduling, etc. No audio or video editing on this anymore.

It's a 40 Gig HDD for the OS with about 25% free, so that shouldn't be the problem.

Anyway, I was thinking of buying a new HDD and reinstalling the original OS (jaguar, then the panther upgrade) and starting from scratch. Instead of trying to clone the drive, I was just going to take the existing drive and put it into an external housing to have access to my older files when I need them, maybe transferring over the ones I still use regularly.

Will that be a problem since the drive is now the bootable one? Can you have a HDD with an OS in an external housing if it isn't the one you want to boot up anymore?

Any tips would be helpful.
 
I don't have much in the way of advice, but I have a G3 iMac Blueberry. If nothing else, it should make you feel much better :)
 
Yeah, I love this thing. I've never been one of those "let's get the newest thing" kinda guys. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. I probably spend about 8 hours a day in front of it and it suits me fine.

But it isn't up to the HD and Raw footage I use my Mac Pro for.
 
There are two internal slots in this tower. You can just add the new one (sata, not esata I believe) and load it up as your boot drive, then just switch your startup drive in system prefs. I loved my quicksilver, stable as hell.
 
It might have killed my Digital Audio

It might have killed my Digital Audio

It might have killed my Digital Audio but I had a Sonnet sata card and 6 internal drives. I know that has nothing to do with your question. To answer that you will have no problem with the external drive housing. You might have issue trying to use the external as a boot drive, especially if you go USB instead of Firewire. When you select the new drive as startup that is the one the OSX uses.
 
Yeah, I don't want to use it as my boot drive. I just want to keep everything intact there in case I ever need it.

Thanks
 
Jim Brennan said:
My trusty old 800mhz G4 Quicksilver is really running slow. I do my regular maintenance (repair permissions, Disc Warrior), but I think it's just getting cluttered.

I primarily use it for internet and documents/budgets/scheduling, etc. No audio or video editing on this anymore.

It's a 40 Gig HDD for the OS with about 25% free, so that shouldn't be the problem.

Anyway, I was thinking of buying a new HDD and reinstalling the original OS (jaguar, then the panther upgrade) and starting from scratch. Instead of trying to clone the drive, I was just going to take the existing drive and put it into an external housing to have access to my older files when I need them, maybe transferring over the ones I still use regularly.

Will that be a problem since the drive is now the bootable one? Can you have a HDD with an OS in an external housing if it isn't the one you want to boot up anymore?

Any tips would be helpful.
Click to expand...

This should work just fine. Just go into system preferences and make sure you boot from the new internal, not the external. This is actually a good idea, since if your new internal goes bust you can still boot from the external. Get a firewire external case as only intel macs can boot from USB.
 
what speed is your drive? 7200RPM or a 10K, I'd suggest getting the fastest HDD possible as the HDD is always the slowest component of any PC (or Mac)(maybe even look into SSD aka Solid Sate Drives, expensive yes but has almost zero latency on reads)

Anhar
 
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