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by Wolf Paulus.
Original Post: Beach Ball
Feed Title: Wolf's Web Journal
Feed URL: http://wolfpaulus.com/feed/
Feed Description: Journal - dedicated to excellence, and motivated by enthusiasm to trying new things
More and more often now I was looking at the spinning beach ball, when starting my Apple G5 PowerMac. Since Petra's 12" 1.2GHz iBook showed the very same symptoms, I was blaming Adelphia, one of worst (Cable-)ISPs one can find, and thought it must be their DNS, which has been causing us grieve many times before.
I even un-checked 'Set Date & Time automatically' in System Preferences / Data & Time however, the startup time didn't decrease significantly. Apple's forum has quite a few entries of users complaining about the increased startup time ever since updating from 10.3.5 and even more entries with (black magic) tips about how to work around or fix the problem, i.e. using Fontbook to delete your fonts ?!
However, on the G5 and the iBook neither cleaning all caches with COX (Cache Out X) nor Disk Utility's "Repair Disk Permissons" helped.
Finally, I came across a post that recommended hard coding the DNS entries in System Preferences / Network / TCP/IP. Now that seemed to make some sense, since I was blaming the DNS for the problem all along. After entering the IP addresses of both Adelphia DNSs the startup time is about back to normal I'd say.
Compared to the iPod shuffle's memory (1GB Flash), the G5's looks kind of small. I bought one of those early single processor, 1.8 Ghz G5s that shipped with 512 MB SRAM.
While comparing the shuffle's slow Flash RAM with a G5's super fast DDR SRAM is not really fair, it was still time to bump up the memory. It's not all that cheap but Crucial (Micron Technology, Inc - just like the memory that originally come in your Mac) currently has a promotion for MacWorld readers and also offers free shipping.Therefore both, the G5 and the iBook will get a nice RAM update in the next couple of days.
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