Jack Malmostoso wrote:
As for the rest, check that DMA is activated on your hard drive. Which is
extremely slow anyway... I have an iBook so I know what I'm talking
about :)
Okay, as far as I can tell, the hard disk isn't the issue. I've run
hdparm -t and hdparm -T on a few machines and the numbers on the
PowerBook are not so much lower as to be indicative of being the cause
of performance problems. That said, according to Apple's page on this
machine[0], this machine has a 5400 RPM disk drive, the same as my 100GB
disk for my Thinkpad. Is there any advantage at all to switching out
disks that I'm not aware of?
Someone else mentioned that the memory bandwidth in this machine is
probably lower than my 1.6GHz Pentium-M Thinkpad. Can someone elaborate
on this? Is it so much lower that it would cause GNOME, Iceweasel, and
Icedove to take noticeably longer than normal to start?
I'm frankly surprised that the performance is so poor, because this was
a top of the line machine for it's time (late 2005) and with the 2GB of
memory it has I'm told it originally cost close to US$ 4,000. My
Thinkpad is of about the same era and it seems to perform better, and
with only 768MB of RAM. The Thinkpad was a low-mid-market machine (R51
2883-ELU with an extra 512MB of RAM installed), it cost only about US$
1,000.
Perhaps I'm just paying too close attention to the startup times and
seeing something that's not there? I know these kind of perceptive
problems are no fun to debug because there's not always a clear
cause-and-effect...
At any rate, I'm crossing over to the dark side for a little
while...trying Mac OS X and some other PPC Linux distributions (it has
FC6 on it right now) to get a better idea of how the machine performs
with other OSes. I much prefer Debian, of course, so I'm going to keep
trying to coax full performance out of this machine under everyone's
favorite free OS...
Andrew
[0]
http://support.apple.com/specs/powerbook/PowerBook_G4_17-inch_1_67GHz.html
-- The 17" SuperDrive model is what I have
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