OS X Tiger Crawls
OS X 10.4.1 on my dual 1.8 GHz G5 crawls like a wounded Tiger. I feel like I’m running System 7.1 on a Mac IIsi half the time. Everything runs slower under Tiger and it’s starting to drive me crazy.
It used to be that when I changed the name of a file, in a Finder window, the list of files would sort alphabetically, immediately. Now it can take as long as 10 seconds. Icons in the dock tend to freeze now and again. Opening a file in dialog box can hang my system for up to a minute. PhotoShop 7.0 runs, rather it crawls. I just updated to PhotoShop CS 2 and it seems sluggish as well.
What gives? I suspect that Spotlight is slowing down my system as it indexes all of my files. Constantly. I hate it! I never use it and want the option to get rid of it!
Have you tried running a slideshow by right-clicking a group of jpeg files. It can take about 20 seconds to run after staring at the colour beachball icon. While this is a cool feature, I don’t like having to wait for it to work. I find I’m doing a lot of waiting lately with Tiger and it is slowing down my workflow. I hope Apple releases an upgrade that will address these major speed issues. I guess this is the price of early adoption.
Stumble It!Posted in OS X Software at 12:40 PM
Comments
This should help you.
http://www.tuaw.com/2005/05/13/tiger-tips-hate-spotlight-turn-it-off/
Let me know if you need help with the terminal stuff.
Posted by: Ryan on June 13, 2005 1:31 PM
Jay - I’ve been finding the same thing. Did you try the above terminal hack? Does it work? I really like spotlight but not at the expense of speed - this is killing me. Especially on my new PowerBook - my old TiBook seemed faster and it had half the RAM and only a 667mHz processor. Sigh.
Have you read anything else about Tiger slowing things down?
Posted by: david on June 13, 2005 9:03 PM
I tried the MaxFixIt terminal hack to turn Spotlight OFF. I also turned off indexing and deleted my old index via the terminal.
It’s still too soon to say but I hope that this will give me back the speed that I used to have pre-Spotlight. I use Microsoft Entourage for email so I shouldn’t run into problems. If you’re using Apple’s Mail for email then you’re out of luck. It uses Spotlight.
I’ll post an update after I’ve used my Spotlightless system for a day.
You may want to turn off some of the Dashboard widgets you don’t use a lot (I never use any of mine). They can eat up memory. The more your system has to go to a swap disk, the slower it will run.
Posted by: Jay on June 13, 2005 10:23 PM
