Richard Mondello

My MacBook Pro returns from its extended hiatus today, Monday. Over the last twelve days, I’ve been living on a 450mhz PowerMac G4 Cube with 640 MB of RAM. It’s eye-opening not only how difficult the transition has been for me, but how usable the older and slower machine actually is.

Moving down from a 2.16 Core2Duo MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM is difficult for a few reasons. The first is just plain speed. Running Camino, my Macintosh web browser of choice, was painful on the Cube. There were optimized builds available, which helped somewhat, but browsing was slow and unpleasant. Loading a comment thread on Digg caused the browser to lock up for around ten seconds, playback of Flash videos (like the ones on YouTube) was tricky, and having more than four tabs open turned the browser into a snail.

The second difficulty in jumping to a computer introduced in July of 2000 is its operating system. My MacBook Pro runs Apple’s recently introduced version of Mac OS X, Leopard. As we know, the G4 Cube can run Leopard, but it is largely unstable. Thus, for the last twelve days, I’ve been using Mac OS X Tiger. Although Leopard has bugs that I often twitter about, it is the most impressive operating system I have ever used. The perspective I have from running this antiquated computer for so long lets me see that.

My third difficulty was not being able to do certain tasks. For example, I encountered a major design bug on my site this week thanks to a reader email (thanks, Michael Clark!), but could not fix it. I couldn’t trust the Cube to run the all of software I use to fix up Exposay (Transmit, Coda, Safari, Firefox, Opera) at the same time. I’ll fix the bug as soon as possible.

Doing a key school assignment in the last week was very difficult on this computer. My word processor of choice is Office 2008 for the Mac, which is a very slow and very unstable application on a 450mhz PowerPC G4. To be fair, its requirements clearly state that a PowerPC G4 processor must be clocked at 500MHz or faster for it to run acceptably.

I pushed this machine to its limit this week. I had Camino, Adium, iTunes, Finder, TextEdit, Dictionary, Last.fm, Twitterrific, QuickSilver, and the Gmail Notifier running at almost all times. Although it was most definitely difficult to use, the machine never crashed once, even under long stretches of 100% CPU load.

Really, I’m fortunate to have purchased this extra computer. For what I spent on it, $250, it really came in handy. Besides serving as my Mom’s computer, it never hurts for me to have a backup machine. If it ran Leopard natively, it would have been perfect. I would have just cloned by MacBook Pro’s hard disk to it and carried on as usual. That’s a wonderful aspect of the Mac - true application and data portability from machine to machine. It’s a shame that the Cube could only run Tiger.

Besides downloading optimized versions of some of my applications, running the computer at a lower color depth was helpful in speeding things up. Rather than displaying millions of colors on my screen, I elected to display only thousands of colors.

I hope my experience will provide some insight to others running slow computers and let everyone else appreciate their modern supercomputers. I’m glad to be back.