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Well...it's not THAT slow, but I can't run Photoshop or Illustrator or Flash or Dreamweaver or Word without lag. These programs worked fine in XP, but in OSX, they are very slow. I checked my Activity monitor, and I think my CPU usage is okay, the little graph is not fully red at all.

 

I'm running a P4 2.0 Gig, and my Activity monitor says:

 

%User: 6-20

%System: 6

%Nice: 0

%Idle 75-90

 

Threads:159

Process:48

 

I don't know what any of this means, but anyways...I think my speed problems lie within my RAM. Right now I have only 512 MB of PC3200 DDR. On my computer is says:

 

Wired: 76.24 MB

Active: 167 Mb

Inactive: 179 MB

Used: 422 ( Can get up to 500 )

 

Free: 89 (Can get to 10 or less when running programs )

VM size: 4.35 GB

Page ins/outs: 63878/20437

 

 

Do you guys think if I buy another stick of 512 RAM, bumping up my total ram to 1 GIG, it would help a lot? Because I really need to start working on my web and design up, and I don't want my essential programs to be all laggy. Or is there some sort of speed boost thing that I can do? Anyays, get back to me guys! Thank you!

 

-Badly Drawn.

The apps you mentioned are not yet in Universal Binary format, ie they are still meant to work for PPC. But as they are they are taken charge by Rosetta, that permits some PPC aps to run on intels. Hence some lag.

 

Adobe will eventually release CS3 and the former Macromedia apps as Universal Binary applications, and you'll then enjoy full speed (barring any bloat).

 

I'm not saying you have hardware problems (I'll leave that to intel box owners to see), but the above should be taken as one possible source of the lag.

Yeah I'm definitely going to upgrade the memory, but I just hope that it fixes the terrible lag on my programs. I'm hoping a gig will be enough because from what I see right now, OSX is using most of my 512.

 

From what you posted, you're only really using 243.24 mb of RAM. This is from Apple's support site:

"Inactive memory

This information is no longer being used and has been cached to disk, but it will remain in RAM until another application needs the space. Leaving this information in RAM is to your advantage if you (or a client of your computer) come back to it later. "

 

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918

 

So you should really only add the wired and active RAM up to in order to see how much you have free. And while I would reccomend the RAM upgrade, note that it's not going to help you too much when it comes to programs like Photoshop and Word that are being run through Rosetta. The speed there is more dependent on your processor, not your RAM.

Oh really? Hmm...so I have a P4 2 gig, you think its worth upgrading to a P4 3 gig or somehting or just save up and build a new C2D system?

 

But in the meantime, what can I do right now to solve my program issues? It's really frustrating having a laggy pen in illustrator Grr!

as said before they arent universal binary. Try out CS3 and see if that lags the same amount. You cant do anything to fix programs that arent universal binary since they are being emulated by rosetta and will always be slow. Dreamweaver is slow as hell for me because of rosetta but photoshop CS3 runs great despite photoshop being far more resource heavy than dreamweaver.

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