On Aug 26, 2005, at 8:12 AM, dafydd hughes wrote:

1. Anybody running Pd and 10.4 on a G4 Powerbook 867 with 640 MB RAM? Is 10.4 perhaps written for faster computers, meaning I should go back to 10.3?

I would stick with 10.3 if it was working fine. There aren't a lot of new audio features in 10.4 that Pd uses and the graphics and video ones like CoreImage/GLSL you can't use fully on that hardware.

The integrated dictionary is my favorite 10.4 feature so far, which is pretty faint praise.

2. Are there any background processes I should shut down in order to get better audio performance?

Spotlight. There's a system preference panel for excluding volumes. Put all of the drives you have in the list. This will disable searching in the Finder though, so either use locate or a 3rd party tool. Spotlight is one of the dumbest search implementations ever developed. It constantly runs checking and indexing new files and volumes just in case a user happens to search for something on those. It takes many hours to index a modern hard drive during which Spotlight monopolizes disk I/O making the computer slow to a crawl.

Dashboard eats a fair amount of RAM, plus it has serious security issues. Drag it out of the Dock and 'poof' it's gone.

Google for ways to permanently disable these if they are of no use to you.

3. Maybe this one's for a Mac list, but... My initial attempt at upgrading failed part way through due to unspecified errors. A second attempt went fine, even though it looks like 10.4 was half installed (Dashboard was showing etc). Is a clean install in order?

I usually put new OS upgrades on an external Firewire drive for testing first.

cgc