I HATE APPLE

the occasional clean-up care/of Onyx and it's ilk doesn't hurt too much.

also there's some free preference cleaner apps.

Have as much free space as possible and turn off fonts and deal with font conflicts.

oh shit. how do i clean up my fonts? i know those are a mess, i had a really ridiculous linotype fontexplorer x system set up and one day i just abandoned it because i was so pissed at it. will just asking it to clean up the fonts fix it, or do i have to do something else?

like mentioned above, look for duplicates. If you turn everything off in Fontexplorer then open Font Book, how many fonts are loaded? Are there any black dots?

Fontexplorer does a fine job and what it's for, but it won't save you from conflicts you may already have.

ok, i deactivated 1420-ish fonts down to 72 or so and turned the font requests back on. for some reason a lot of my documents seem to call for fonts they don't actually use?!? already running faster. now i need to get that 500 gig HD ...

http://www.fontgear.net/fontdoctor.html

you had 1420 fonts active? well shit there is your answer.

hahah yeah that is definitely like "why does my car run slowly" "I forgot to mention I have a grand piano strapped to the roof at all times"

I can't recommend those new Seagate Momentus XT drives enough. I threw one into my new-this-year MBP (that I admittedly stuck with the stock 5400rpm drive on) and it's like night and day. I mean, it's partially because the drive isn't spinning so slowly, but the 4GB of flash read cache is excellent.

got a barely one y.o. MBP and keep getting really long "beachball" freezes in iTunes. Is this normal.

is it reading mp3s from an external drive

nope - huge library but all saved on the internal drive. The freeze seems to occur at very random moments too, not when searching or playing songs.

check to see if there are any repeating errors on Console.app

My 500GB HD shows up tonight. What is the easiest way to take my current HD image and get it onto the new drive?

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/

Cool. So I guess I just need an external SATA to USB/FW case, and I should be good o go. I don't have to boot up from a CD or anything, right?

Yeah, get a case, put the drive in it, plug it in to your computer, let SuperDuper copy your current drive to the new one, then swap drives and boot up.

I can't recommend those new Seagate Momentus XT drives enough. I threw one into my new-this-year MBP (that I admittedly stuck with the stock 5400rpm drive on) and it's like night and day. I mean, it's partially because the drive isn't spinning so slowly, but the 4GB of flash read cache is excellent.

...is that kinda like addin 4gb of RAM?

it's really like 1000% better

now i'm going to delete like 30 GB of roleplaying and comic book scans that i never look at

baaderonix are you using a ton of smart playlists? if you are, turn off live updating

It's not really like adding ram at all, it's like a halfassed SSD attempt that is really economical! Basically, the drive itself does all the caching of blocks (not files) that are often read. So your most often used 4GB of data is read at SSD speed, and the rest is read at a decent 7200rpm, I believe.

85. hashtags are the new changeable DNs of olde ilx #

It's not really like adding ram at all, it's like a halfassed SSD attempt that is really economical! Basically, the drive itself does all the caching of blocks (not files) that are often read. So your most often used 4GB of data is read at SSD speed, and the rest is read at a decent 7200rpm, I believe.

ohhhhh. neat! how many dolla

Ta da!

Like a hundo.

wow, one last bump in performance to eke out of my old pwerbook perhaps?

hard drive is not the bottleneck in a powerbook

:(

an faster but less transparent alternative, btw, if you can live with the mental overhead of two partitions/drives is to move the OS and apps to one of these http://www.amazon.com/FileMate-PCI-Express-card-Retail/dp/B001QSZDJ8/ref=pd_sim_e_1.

what pb do you have?

with the 13" MBP does it come stocked w/2x2GB RAM or 1x4GB?

I already know the answer don't I :'(

2x2 apparently (sez system profiler)

bummer

that 48 GB SSD seems like a great idea

bad idea if you use your expresscard slot for anything else, but http://onethingwell.org/post/977670277/go-ssd

that seems like a really great idea. faster than new MBPs? deal.

i have a 15 inch PB G4, 1.5GHz, 2GB RAM

interesting idea about the SSD card; i definitely never use that slot

is 2gb the maximum ram on those? i would start there (along with some hard drive tidying if things seem slower than they used to be). but yeah, i'd def be thinking about the expresscard thing if i expected to keep this mbp. would be slightly concerned it would complicate backups and day to day use having two partitions. gonna sell this and get an macbook air and walk the effin earth though.

yes it is the max. maybe i shouldn't bother with the expresscard if as you say my HD isn't the bottleneck though.

nothing's really slower than it used to be, apps are just bigger and less efficient with every release.

i HATE apple

my hard drive just died, again, for no reason and out of nowhere. went out for a run and left a cd importing LIKE I ALWAYS DO, came back, screen frozen, computer wouldn't turn back on. tried those weird combinations of keys you press with the start button, none of them worked, one of them made it make an alarming beep and brought up the flashing file/question mark of doom, plus it's making weird clicking noises, so i assume the BARELY FOUR-MONTH-OLD hard drive has died FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER. why? why why whyyyyyyyyyy is this? two months out of my warranty, too.

i could totally deal with hard drive failure if it was the result of some stupid thing i did or even a virus, but OUT OF THE BLUE AND FOR NO REASON - i can't deal with that at all. i don't want to hear about how computers "just do" this otherwise i will actually get a hammer and smash every computer i come across until i am actually sectioned. this is so fucking inconvenient this week as well.

i actually think i have a spare HD - from the last time, BARELY FOUR MONTHS AGO, when my computer gave me shit, and the utter cunts at the so-called "genius" "bar" misdiagnosed the problem like three times, replacing my HD when it turned out they needed to replace the fan. i don't think i know how to replace HDs though.

i guess it'd be foolish to hope that the HD hasn't died? i would really like to not have lost various documents (obv not backed up, duh, also stfu).

oh that sucks

lol @ (obv not backed up, duh, also stfu) tho

clicking sound = probably hard drive death. sorry man.

using a hard drive is like parking on the hard shoulder.

xp to tracer: 2GB is ok - my old mb ran on that and it was solid. i was expecting less when you said "pb". since you can't change the g4, expresscard is certainly worth a shot. order one from amazon uk, see if it has any effect and if not then send it back. google around first though and check you can do this with pbs. maybe booting issues for older machines but dunno.

well the thing with backing up is that of course one does it periodically but not EVERY TIME one changes a document or makes a new one

oh god there are a bunch of interviews on that computer that i could really really do with not losing

this doesn't help but if this is true of stuff you change regularly and can't afford to lose or recreate: "well the thing with backing up is that of course one does it periodically but not EVERY TIME one changes a document or makes a new one" you need to change the way you backup. dropbox.

or time machine.

clicking sound = probably hard drive death

but it's only FOUR MONTHS OLD. i mean, i believe you, but it's basically brand new and i actually go out of my way not to bother it - i run the bare minimum of basic applications, no fancy downloads or plug-ins or whatever, i never take risks with downloading anything, i always shut it down completely at night, the HD wasn't anywhere near full, so...whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy? if it's totally random and can happen even to a brand new HD, what's the point in taking all that care in the first place? and why can't we get HDs that don't do this?

xp i kept meaning to investigate dropbox, as well as a couple of other options i was told about, but never got round to it :(

i had time machine on that computer but couldn't understand how to get it to work :(

i probably really need to know how best to back up an external HD (which is where all my music is) - is there an online solution for that much data? rather than the unwieldy/expensive route of another external HD?

if it's totally random and can happen even to a brand new HD, what's the point in taking all that care in the first place? and why can't we get HDs that don't do this?

solid state drives, but they are expensive :(

hard drives don't really die for any particular reason. there's just a non zero chance of them failing from normal use. that chance approaches certainty with enough time, but sometimes people just get unlucky. that's what i mean by saying it's like parking on the hard shoulder.

keep this in mind when figuring out how to back up: one day your hard drive _will_ die. if your backup strategy doesn't work in that situation then it's no use. i've probably lost 1/3 of the hard drives i've owned to failure. the other 2/3 i was lucky enough to get rid of before they failed.

take it to someone though. it might not be the hard drive. quickest way to check is to suggest they boot up in "target disk mode" and see if they can read from the drive (at which point you should immediately backup!).

how much music are we talking lex? 50gb? 500?

that is fucking bullshit lex.

lex have you at least tried booting from a CD? if you can get ahold of a system CD and figure out a way to remove the CD that was already in your computer so that you can stick in the system CD, you can start up and hold down "C" (to make it boot from the CD). from there you can run a few tests to see if your HD really is fucked (tho i am sorry to say it sounds like that's very likely)

time machine works by opening system preferences, going to time machine, specifying an external drive that you want to use as your backup (this obviously requires buying an external drive at least as big as your hard drive) and that's it really.