as the title states, im just wondering what kinds of tweaks there are for OSX to make it faster on slower systems. i dont mind loosing some of the look that it has. all i know is when i drag a window or somthing its choppy. with itunes its really slow. plays fine but just slow.
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You can start off by going into dock system preferences and turning off "animate opening applications". You could also do a search for "shadowkiller" in www.versiontracker.com and that will remove system shadows i.e. the menu bar shadow just below the menu bar.
here is a link directly to shadowkiller
http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/shadowkiller
allows you to permanently kill the finder to save ram, and then launch it when you want it
http://fly.to/infosoft/
Make sure you have more than 256MB and preferably 512MB of RAM. Defrag your hard drive occasionally, quit any applications you're not using (note, unlike Winblows, closing the last open window will often -not- kill the application - you need to quit it), and leave at least a gig of free space on your main drive.
any others?? i have 320 mb ram and about 1.5gb free space on my lombard. i only run what i need to as well.
im going to upgrade it's harddrive to a thirty gig that i striped from a dead thinkpad, upgrade it's memory to 512mb i stripped from my dead thinkpad. Does your battery still hold well?
Disable Dashboard:
[quote]Open Terminal, and then type this command, followed by the Return key:
defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
This tells the system that you no longer wish to have Dashboard available. However, the Dashboard task is actually “owned
im running panther, so i guess dashboard and spotlight arent in mine. however the battery is holding! amazing as it is, killing the bad way did recover mine, although i dont recomend trying it unless its doing exactly what mine was. as far as the 30gb notebook drive you have, make sure its ATA-5 or it wont work right as far as i can tell.
I recently got a 400mhz pismo with 384mb of ram and a slow, 6GB hdd drive. I run Tiger on it and i use it for basic work, like web surfing, word procesing and some light web development. I just started a mission to make this computer as fast as possible for this type of work. This is what ive done so far.
- I disabled dashboard to free some ram
but in fact it helps alot in general snappines 
- I removed all printer drivers and localization in OSX to get some more disk space (ill buy a new 5400 rpm hdd anyway, they are very cheap and performance boost from faster hdd is huge).
- I removed font smoothing. It is uglier, but you get used to it and scrolling is MUCH faster. Safari is now actualy plesat to surf with even on large sites.
- I used TinkerTool to disable some gfx effects like gennie effect, dock animation etc.
- I boosted keyboard repeat speed an mouse tracking speed. You can do that in system preferences under "Keyboard and mouse". When i first read that tip i didnt even want to try it because it sounded stupid to me
- I used Atiaccelerator II to overclock gfx card (cpu 140mhz / ram 120, maybe i can go even higher). I also boosted cache speed from 160mhz to 200mhz (it should go up to 267mhz in pismos but mine is crashing with that settings. Not much improvement there, but better something than nothing).
Thats about it. I also tried shadowkiller but performance boost wasnt that big and i find shadows useful. Im also experimenting with themes to remove transparency, but dont want to change the system too much since i like the way OSX looks.
The only benchmark i used is a "let 1k windows bloom" proggy that opens and closes 1000 windows. You can find it on google. I managed to get the results around 35 seconds with these settings, even few seconds less with shadowkiller. Thats is more than 100% improvement over stock Pismo 400. In real world my computer is not not only usable but very plesant to work with and OSX still looks very nice.
I hope that helps