8.5.1 RAM Hog?

[LCARS]

While I've been on my classic Mac sort-and-restore binge, I installed 8.5.1 on my 2300c (with 56MB RAM). It was running the original owner's install of 8.1 with lots and lots of stuff. However that System Software RAM total was around 10MB. After I installed the OS and all the usual programs, Office 98, Speed Doubler 8, Adobe Type Reunion, and SimCity 2000, my System Software is almost 19MB jumping up to 24 when I have Word open.

I went through and disabled the usual array of Extensions and yet with the exception of my 8600 with lots of RAM, this Duo has the largest System Software of them all. My machines either have 7.6.1 or 9.2.2- is this a quirk of 8.5? How many extensions are necessary for Ethernet file sharing? It also feels laggy compared to 7.6. Maybe a 3D trashcan isn't worth it after all...

 

[Byrd]

Mac OS 8.5 generally has an unpolished feel, with significantly more bloat and more unwieldy RAM requirements than its predecessors.  It was essentially a crossover OS between Apple removing a lot of 68K code and having more PPC aware and native programs.  Because of this, it's not uncommon to see several MB of RAM fluctuate in the OS much more over Mac OS 8.x and 7.6.  

I run Mac OS 8.6 on my PowerBook 2300c (just recently put in a CF hard disk to help things); if you've come this far and want to run more modern PPC applications you might as well go this over 8.5.1.  However, the lowly 100Mhz 603e isn't a great performer and any version of Mac OS 8.x will be more sluggish over Mac OS 7.6 (which I'd only run on a 2300c if you didn't care for PPC apps).

 

[LCARS]

Thanks, Byrd. I'll try 8.6 (wonderful that it's so easy to do today). I was very surprised at how bloated 8.5 feels, especially when transferring data on the network. The only PPC app that I run with any regularity is Office 98 and I run it under 7.6. Out of curiosity, which apps do you run (or would one run) that would be significantly better running on 8.6+?

Running 7.6, my 8600 feels almost comparable to my contemporary Mac laptop in terms of speed. I also suppose that that 3.5" SCSI drive is faster than the 2.5" in the Duo. Have you noticed a significant increase in speed with the CF card?

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

I run Mac OS 8.6 on my PowerBook 2300c (just recently put in a CF hard disk to help things); if you've come this far and want to run more modern PPC applications you might as well go this over 8.5.1.  However, the lowly 100Mhz 603e isn't a great performer and any version of Mac OS 8.x will be more sluggish over Mac OS 7.6 (which I'd only run on a 2300c if you didn't care for PPC apps).

At what point in OS development were fat binaries entirely eliminated? ISTR an application which removed 68K pudginess from a PPC OS install?

Running 7.6, my 8600 feels almost comparable to my contemporary Mac laptop in terms of speed. I also suppose that that 3.5" SCSI drive is faster than the 2.5" in the Duo. Have you noticed a significant increase in speed with the CF card?

No surprise there, running its contemporary apps under its first release OS will make any computer feel about like following generations. There's what seems a very tight correlation between Moore's Law and OS overload/feature bloat/system resource requirements. Running earlier versions of AI on my 2300c for speed kept it on a par with or more quickly than the current version on the graphics workhorse at the shop.

 

[CC_333]

No surprise there, running its contemporary apps under its first release OS will make any computer feel about like following generations. There's what seems a very tight correlation between Moore's Law and OS overload/feature bloat/system resource requirements. Running earlier versions of AI on my 2300c for speed kept it on a par with or more quickly than the current version on the graphics workhorse at the shop.

Agreed.

I remember when my clamshell iBook felt fast, and when it's running all the stuff it ran back then (1999-2004), it still feels just about as fast, but when I try to run more recent stuff, like, say Mac OS X 10.4 and TenFourFox, it feels 1000% slower.

So the trick to keeping older machines feeling fast is to just stick to contemporary software.  That way, provided there aren't any features you need which weren't available back then, you can work just as fast on a PowerBook G3 as you could on the latest and greatest MacBook Pro.

To that end, if software bloat didn't have this terrible habit of growing at the same rate as CPU/RAM/HDD speed, modern computers would probably feel many hundreds of times faster than they do;  I find it inexcusable that a 4 GHz i9 with 64 GB of RAM (random example) from last year can only feel about as fast with Windows 10 as a Core2 Duo with 4 GB RAM can with either XP or 7, which says a lot for the steady decline in software quality overall, since a 4 GHz i9 should in theory be at least several orders of magnitude faster than even the fastest C2Ds.  I get it that some bloat is inevitable because of all the fancy new features and security layers that have been invented since then, but still!  Whatever happened to efficient coding?  Most software today is shamefully wasteful, and there's no reason why I need such a fast machine to do simple word processing, but that's the way it is, and I suppose that's how it'll continue for now....

c

 

[Byrd]

Thanks, Byrd. I'll try 8.6 (wonderful that it's so easy to do today). I was very surprised at how bloated 8.5 feels, especially when transferring data on the network. The only PPC app that I run with any regularity is Office 98 and I run it under 7.6. Out of curiosity, which apps do you run (or would one run) that would be significantly better running on 8.6+?

Running 7.6, my 8600 feels almost comparable to my contemporary Mac laptop in terms of speed. I also suppose that that 3.5" SCSI drive is faster than the 2.5" in the Duo. Have you noticed a significant increase in speed with the CF card?

IIRC Mac OS 8.6 includes significantly more PPC code, so while it'll be a bit of a slug on low end PPCs like the 2300c you can probably strip it down for acceptable usability.  It is also a much more stable OS than 8.5.x; I wouldn't say what apps run better on it but I find Office 98 pretty good on my 2300c.

Re: CF card, it helps with a decent speed boost and no noise from the terrible drive that it came stock with. 

 

[LCARS]

The stock drive is quite a noisemaker. I'm guessing a 4200rpm drive? It has been a labor of love to try each OS via network installation (bad run of repository disk image burns).

Byrd, out of curiosity, do you use the keyboard? I think mine is a rev2 unit and it was awful when I bought it and awful(er) now. It makes the late butterfly keyboards feel like a mile of key travel.

 

[Byrd]

My 2300c keyboard is terrible - that's why I usually use it in a dock   Mushy, imprecise