Fine tuning the old G4 and G5 Power PC Mac

Much before the Intel Macs, Apple use to bank upon their G4 & G5 Mac computers which were at that time the most powerful personal computers developed by Apple Inc. The time is now when most of the PowerPC processors have been replaced with the Intel Macs; still many users of the G series are easily available. Trust this, I too have both Intel, and PPC machines places at two different desks within a same room. The Intel Mac proves to be a great assistance in daily working life while the G4 machine proves to be a great source for testing.

PowerPC Macs	Duration of Existence
G4 (PPC74xx)	1999 - 2004
G5 (IBM Processor)	2003 - 2006

But it would certainly be fine if both the system's (Intel & PPC) performances are not compared because doing this would be a great injustice. To me, both machines depend upon their hardware specifications which in turn in more advanced with the Intel Macs as they were produce later. My only concern is to extract fine performances from the G4 with Tiger 4.11 installed. Being a testing machine the PPC G4 has to be in fine shape both physically as well as logically. Upgrading its hard drive along with the RAM size could result in healthy performance of the Mac including upgrading to the latest OS X which in case in Tiger (10.4).

Coming to the OS X, this is where lies huge potential to boost the execution of the system with the help of several tricks like: -

• Drive Management – Must segregate the drive into no. of logical volumes depending upon the size of the hard drive. This separates the boot volume from rest of the data.

• Neat Desktop - Arranging icons on the desktop of the Mac by keeping only required application programs.

• Trim down the Dock – Like desktop, cut down the no. of application icons from the dock. Keep only required shortcuts. 
  
  
• Download folder – All downloads from the web stays into the download folder as long as they are not shifted to trash after their proper use.

• Trash folder Management – Deleted files should not reside in the trash for long durations. Timely removal of the trash data quickly gains free space for the HDD.

• Boot Volume Management – Like the trash and the download folder, the Start-up disk should never run out of memory space which is utmost crucial for the fine performance of the G4 Mac. Find out how to get rid of error 'Your Startup Disk is almost full'. The below message flashes to prompt the user to begin freeing up space on the Mac hard drive by deleting unnecessary data from caches, system logs, junk files and unwanted apps.

• Tools – Cleaning a large hard drive sometimes could be beyond human effort which is why you can turn up-to free tools such as Onyx and much advance remedy for slow Mac like Stellar Speedup Mac.

P.S. - Cleaning tricks for Mac could be applied to Intel machines as same suggested for PowerPC Macs.