Leopard is slow on my Power Mac G5
I finally got a few design projects out of the way and thought it would be safe to upgrade to Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard). I backed everything up installed the new system and have been disappointed ever since.
I’m using a PowerPC Macintosh and I’m finding that Leopard is slow! A dual 1.8 GHz PowerPC G5 with 2 GB RAM running Leopard feels underpowered.
A day after upgrading my system, Adobe Photoshop CS2 wouldn’t work. For the first time ever I encountered this dreaded message.
I ponied up $199.00 and downloaded the Photoshop CS3 upgrade. The installer wouldn’t run. The Photoshop CS3 Beta that I installed earlier in the year was conflicting with the final release (even though I uninstalled the application after the beta expired).
I’m guessing that a lot of people ran into the same problems that I did because Adobe has a page on their site for the Adobe CS3Clean Script which removes any trace of a Photoshop CS3 Beta install. This software worked and allowed me to proceed with my Photoshop CS3 installation.
After the installation I clicked on my shiny new Photoshop CS3 icon and waited. I watched the icon bounce and bounce and then in stopped. Photoshop refused to start. Groan.
Instead of putting my fist through my Cinema Display I went for a Cocktail — Mac OS X disk utility software. Before this would work I had to download the Leopard-compatible version. More Leopard updates. Groan.
After a restart, running Cocktail, and another restart, my old G5 was happy again. Photoshop CS3 launched right away and I was back in business. This was a 3 hour ordeal.
Leopard seems to run a little faster now but I think my tired G5 will have to step aside for an Intel-based Mac Pro computer. I’m just not sure I’m ready for a 3.0GHz, 8-core Intel Xeon-based Mac Pro.
Stumble It!Posted in Apple and OS X Software at 2:35 PM
Comments
Leopard is running well on my Quad G5. I don’t run it on my primary dev machine (macbook pro) though. Too many things broke on the quad when I installed Leopard. MySQL was destroyed, all sorts of unix goodness I had installed was ruined. To be expected I suppose, that’s why I did it on the casual machine first.
If Jobs et al announce a souped up macbook pro at macworld I am going to jump on it and begin building a dream Leopard dev machine from scratch, keeping the current machine available for current projects.
Posted by: Ryan on January 4, 2008 4:09 PM
Hi—
I solved my wife’s bouncy CS3 install by opening a terminal window, and pecking in “sudo /Volumes/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Adobe Photoshop CS3/Setup.app/Contents/MacOS/Setup” and entering in the password. Not sure what the difference is compared to the standard app, but that worked for me.
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Posted by: Eric Y. Theriault on January 15, 2008 1:19 AM
I’m just about to get a 2nd hand Powermac G5 from a colleague. Leopard itself isn’t a good buy for now, even for newer (read:Intel) macs. I advise to hold on a bit to Tiger.
Don’t forget to update your PowerMac G5 (get the updates on support site of Apple) before doing anything.
Posted by: Aki on January 15, 2008 12:46 PM
I found leopard to be a little bit slow on my powermac single cpu 1.8ghz G5.. I received it second hand on ebay.. a nice upgrade from my old 500mhz G4. The G5 only came with 512mb ram so i guess it was pretty dumb to upgrade to Leopard before i got a chance to upgrade the ram. i ordered another 1 gig for now. I’m a student on a tight budget. I think i can put up to 8gigs memory in this… I checked on everymac.com and I have the PCI-X version and it said 8gig on that model. I may revert back to Tiger.. there was nothing wrong with it, like they say.. if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Posted by: Dan on May 11, 2008 10:13 PM
