Slow Mail Client - macmunkey

Is that really surprising? Minimum requirements show OS 10.2 as the earliest compatible system, and running any version of OS X on any G3 is unacceptably slow to the best of my own knowledge. My own G3's will never see anything beyond 9.1 and they're great at what they've been chosen to do. But OS X needs at least a G4 to deliver even a perception of satisfactory performance as far as I can tell. 10.4.11 and SeaMonkey are terrific on my G4 Mini with a gig of RAM BTW.

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Thursday, December 20 2007 @ 11:22 PM PST

Slow Mail Client - MacGuffin

I haven't downloaded the update yet, but I run the last version on my 1 GHz TiBook with 1 GB RAM and it works fine--it's a nice browser.
I tried to run the first release of OS X on a Wall Street years ago and finally had to give up, so I can't even imagine anything more current on a G3. I guess it can be done, but I don't think it's the way to go. Expecting a Sea Monkey to run well given such a configuration seems a tad unreasonable.

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Wednesday, March 26 2008 @ 05:42 AM PDT

Slow Mail Client - petrologist

That I can explain. I discovered that Steve Jobs waits for no system programmer. :-)

During the mid-80s, he was demonstrating and selling the first NExT cubes on the Princeton campus, before the OS even ran. "Probably just a race condition somewhere." (Perhaps he was hoping a buyer would fix it for him. :-)

So, I'm not surprised he was selling MacOSX 10.1 on Macs before it ran. (MacOSX 10.2 ran fast and flawlessly on my G3 iBook. It never once crashed.) Notice one always sees 10.2 as a supporting OS, but never 10.1. It even came with a great encyclopedia, which we weren't told would disappear with an upgrade. :-(

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Tuesday, November 25 2008 @ 11:38 PM PST

Slow Mail Client - petrologist

Little caveat here. :-) Didn't I see just a MacOSX 10.2 requirement above? That suggests Seamonkey's code will run fast, give a fast OS. G3s were sold with this operating system, and mine, with 256 MB RAM, ran 10.4.(small number) fast.

My suggestion is, since the G3 has plenty of RAM, it should run it well unless (1) your OS is too large or disk space too small, or (2) your OS is too slow. In the first case, Seamonkey should swap (rather than page), say, the mail and the browser processes separately. Switching would be very slow. Use one at a time.

You can fix both problems 1 and 2 by downgrading. My 256 MB G3 iBook is currently running 10.4.11 (thanks to my not paying attention). Firefox runs fast if I dump many system processes (not advisable!). (Upgrades don't separate large enhancements from patches; and, after all, Apple sells hardware.) Mine ran fast on 10.4.(small number); so I'm downgrading over a weekend to 10.4.0 (by disk), then upgrading to 10.4.8 (with an Apple upgrade). 10.4.8 was a good vintage, a hybridized BSD Unix.

Were I you, I should run three huge applications at once and test if they respond as Seamonkey does. If so, downgrading may let your run Seamonkey on your G3. Some websites provide old versions of the most popular Mac applications. Ask the Apple Boards (or a less biased site).

Petrologist

PS. When you feel the desperate need for new applications that are not available for your G3, remember that SourceForge offers free old ones, as does Fink & MacPorts.

When you're finally thinking yard sale, remember that GNU/Linux would run extremely fast (with no bloat) on your computer; and Debian offers 10,000 free, professional applications that do most everything. Some desktops are genuine OOUI (if you're into futuristic), and GNUstep will let you build Mac applications for newer computers using Objective-C.

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Tuesday, November 25 2008 @ 11:03 PM PST