I'm guessing it's a G4, so you won't be able to run Snow Leopard on it, but Tiger or vanilla Leopard will run fine.
The absolute best things you can do to get it working smoothly are to max out the internal RAM and put a fresh OS install on it.
Oh, and use Click2Flash. It'll make internet browsing far more bearable.
― Millsner, Monday, 29 March 2010 02:46 (fourteen years ago) link
Absolutely seconded. RAM upgrade + fresh install works wonders. It's amazing how many of my friends have gotten new computers because their old ones "broke" or "had a virus" but in reality were just bogged down and un-tinkered with.
― every potty I know can be found here (Stevie D), Monday, 29 March 2010 03:03 (fourteen years ago) link
Well this might be a dumb question but: RAM is just memory, right? Couldn't I just get more memory by clearing off all the crap (files and programs we never use) off the computer? I don't really want to invest more $$$ in this laptop if it's just running slow because of physical issues.
― congratulations (n/a), Monday, 29 March 2010 12:35 (fourteen years ago) link
that would give you more virtual memory yeah, but won't be as good as a real ram upgrade. it's a pain in the ass to upgrade ram on old Powerbooks iirc
― it is just like an unknown puzzle till the end of the world (dyao), Monday, 29 March 2010 13:07 (fourteen years ago) link
clearing files and programs gives you more hard disk space - this is not the same thing as RAM. If you get more RAM then your current programs will run a lot nicer.
― bracken free ditch (Ste), Monday, 29 March 2010 13:08 (fourteen years ago) link
actually i don't rc. should be pretty easy
― it is just like an unknown puzzle till the end of the world (dyao), Monday, 29 March 2010 13:11 (fourteen years ago) link
hm alright.
― congratulations (n/a), Monday, 29 March 2010 13:17 (fourteen years ago) link
installing new RAM in a PB G4 is pretty straightforward: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=95132
buy the parts from crucial. this thing will point you in the right direction: http://www.crucial.com/store/listmodel.aspx?pl=PowerBook&mfgr=Apple&cat=RAM
― caek, Monday, 29 March 2010 14:25 (fourteen years ago) link
do that, then wipe and reinstall. it will go like the clappers.
― caek, Monday, 29 March 2010 14:26 (fourteen years ago) link
it's worth nothing however that RAM prices for PBs are currently rather high because nobody makes DDR RAM anymore. that said, you can probably buy whatever's cheapest at the moment and it'll downclock automatically.
― ain't no thang but a chicken ㅋ (dyao), Monday, 29 March 2010 14:28 (fourteen years ago) link
this seems to be the cheapest deal going right now. however there's one review saying it didn't work too well in their powerbook, and pny is kind of a budget brand.
otherwise, this seems to be the best option if you don't mind paying a little more. crucial is a very big deal in the ram business and you won't go wrong with em imo.
if you have a 12" buy 1 stick, otherwise buy 2 sticks for maximum benefit.
― ain't no thang but a chicken ㅋ (dyao), Monday, 29 March 2010 14:46 (fourteen years ago) link
when creating smart playlists in itunes, is there a way to make the criteria default to album rather than artist?
also on macbooks F7 is the displays button; where is the displays button on the normal apple keyboard?
― etrian odysseus (cozen), Tuesday, 6 April 2010 16:47 (fourteen years ago) link
Say you've got two PDFs exported from InDesign. One has ten grayscale images, the other has ten color images of the same pixel dimensions. You export them using the same preset, "Smallest File Size." Why would the grayscale PDF file size be 3x larger?
― millions now zinging will never lol (WmC), Monday, 19 April 2010 14:39 (fourteen years ago) link
are the grayscale and colour images different sizes (in bytes) as JPGs/in photoshop, etc.?
― caek, Monday, 19 April 2010 14:41 (fourteen years ago) link
the greyscale will be indexed and lossless, the jpeg will be lossy.
― koogs, Monday, 19 April 2010 15:23 (fourteen years ago) link
The images in both documents are native Photoshop files, no lossy file formats used in my ID documents. The color images are CMYK.
― millions now zinging will never lol (WmC), Monday, 19 April 2010 19:45 (fourteen years ago) link
So, yeah, the images have different file sizes -- the color images are bigger. Yet in the PDFs generated out of these documents, the grayscale is bigger.
― millions now zinging will never lol (WmC), Monday, 19 April 2010 19:46 (fourteen years ago) link
okay nothing to do with your questions but what is happening with this threads layout? after a certain post it turns the whole background grey (i'm on the black css option)
― bracken free ditch (Ste), Monday, 19 April 2010 19:55 (fourteen years ago) link
Which post? Likely there's script injection there that's fucking with the stylesheet.
― don't you steal my Sunstein (HI DERE), Monday, 19 April 2010 20:09 (fourteen years ago) link
this one :
geek check: I'm using DHTML to position stuff on a website (in divs, with position:absolute), and can't resolve some Netscape 4.x issues. I *have* to fix them, lots of users on campus here are still running the old browsers.
1) The "background-color:white" property for a centeris not understood by the browser. I don't know how to fix it! Something with tags? I have tried, and no luck. Is there a hack?2) When there is a lot of content in the center, the browser scrunches it all up so that it prints over itself ! What to do?
― daria g, Wednesday, 16 April 2003 00:29 Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
― bracken free ditch (Ste), Monday, 19 April 2010 20:11 (fourteen years ago) link
Is it still happening?
(There was a rogue "<div>" tag in that post that was throwing off the formatting of the page.)
― don't you steal my Sunstein (HI DERE), Monday, 19 April 2010 20:14 (fourteen years ago) link
hmm yes i can still the effect. normally i see seperate grey boxes for each post over a darker grey background. but now i see all the post boxes against the same grey background.
― bracken free ditch (Ste), Monday, 19 April 2010 20:17 (fourteen years ago) link
i took a grab:
http://www.mullsports.com/images/ilxpage.jpg
― bracken free ditch (Ste), Monday, 19 April 2010 20:22 (fourteen years ago) link
lol there was more than one <div> in that post
is it still happening?
― don't you steal my Sunstein (HI DERE), Monday, 19 April 2010 20:28 (fourteen years ago) link
fixed ! you the man
― bracken free ditch (Ste), Monday, 19 April 2010 20:32 (fourteen years ago) link
yay! Now about my PDFs.
― millions now zinging will never lol (WmC), Monday, 19 April 2010 20:40 (fourteen years ago) link
lol, sorry dude
― bracken free ditch (Ste), Monday, 19 April 2010 20:42 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah I can't help you there
Unless maybe the bit fidelity on the greyscale images is larger than the color ones? That seems far-fetched and likely entirely made up but I don't know where else to start looking.
― don't you steal my Sunstein (HI DERE), Monday, 19 April 2010 20:55 (fourteen years ago) link
gaaahh...
OK, went in and looked at the compression settings for PDF export, problem solved (after idly wondering about it for a couple of years).
― millions now zinging will never lol (WmC), Monday, 19 April 2010 21:01 (fourteen years ago) link
do you want your grayscale pdfs to be 3x bigger than colour pdfs: y/n?
― caek, Monday, 19 April 2010 21:21 (fourteen years ago) link
haha, always remember to make sure the "grayscale is hueg" option is turned off
― don't you steal my Sunstein (HI DERE), Monday, 19 April 2010 21:22 (fourteen years ago) link
caek -- definitely no.
This will make a portion of my job much easier.
― millions now zinging will never lol (WmC), Monday, 19 April 2010 21:33 (fourteen years ago) link
what the fuck is the point of RAR? seriously
― Tracer Hand, Monday, 19 April 2010 22:54 (fourteen years ago) link
could be wrong but i think it's always had better self-checking / integrity features than ZIP, especially for multipart archivess
― Nhex, Monday, 19 April 2010 23:03 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah, it does multipart, which used to be a big deal when stuff was distributed on usenet and/or people had slow/unstable connections.also if you are any one part, the magic .par file does some stuff involving check digits will allow you to unrar anyway. also, i think it supported password protection before zip.
basically though, it's a completely pointless holdover from dialup days that "scene" people still like for some reason.
― caek, Monday, 19 April 2010 23:12 (fourteen years ago) link
also if you are ~missing~ any one part
― caek, Monday, 19 April 2010 23:13 (fourteen years ago) link
RAR manages non-Latin characters correctly, ZIP does not.
― Jaq, Monday, 19 April 2010 23:29 (fourteen years ago) link
it's not pointless at all today, especially considering that every free file host has a file size limit, ahem.
and even without .par (which is an awesome thing), you can still extract individual files even if the archive is corrupted - .zip was pretty bad with this
― Nhex, Monday, 19 April 2010 23:33 (fourteen years ago) link
ah yes, was thinking of people who use multipart on bittorrent, which is pointless, but yeah, that makes sense.
i haven't seen a .par for years.
― caek, Monday, 19 April 2010 23:37 (fourteen years ago) link
wth stylesheet is that ste? my eyes!
― etrian odysseus (cozen), Monday, 19 April 2010 23:44 (fourteen years ago) link
Yeah this is U+K.
― anatol_merklich, Friday, 23 April 2010 11:20 (fourteen years ago) link
what setting did you change to fix the PDF problem? I see smallest size is set to downsample color images to 100dpi and grayscale to 150dpi.
In any case, a good trick is to open PDFs in Preview (if on a Mac) and save them again, it strips the file of some extraneous Adobe bullshit that Adobe keeps in the file even when saving to "smallest size".
― dan selzer, Friday, 23 April 2010 13:12 (fourteen years ago) link
I set the downsampling numbers for gray to be the same as for color, and got the fix I was looking for. The files I create in "Smallest File Size" are very rough proofs for advertisers; I may set the downsampling for color and gray images even lower, but maybe not. That one change was v. helpful.
― Nom Nom Nom Chomsky (WmC), Friday, 23 April 2010 13:26 (fourteen years ago) link
I usually change all the settings to downsample to 125 for anything over 125 when I'm making a lo-res PDF for approval purposes. I also sometimes pump up the JPG quality to make it better. And if you haven't played with it, Acrobat itself has a lot of features for lowering the resolution of a PDF, so don't have to keep making new ones.
― dan selzer, Friday, 23 April 2010 14:22 (fourteen years ago) link
there's an app for that: http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/02/shrinkit-1-0/ (10.6+ only)
― caek, Friday, 23 April 2010 14:48 (fourteen years ago) link
yeah, I was going to mention it but I couldn't remember what it was called! I'm still on 10.5 at work though.
― dan selzer, Friday, 23 April 2010 15:04 (fourteen years ago) link
me too. 10.5 for all time.
― caek, Friday, 23 April 2010 15:04 (fourteen years ago) link
I have a long history of frustration with extraneous data in adobe files, when Illustrator CS eps files would be placed in quark and bring in all kinds of color swatches that where in the file's palette but not actually used in the artwork. Very sloppy. And being the neat-freak that I am, I'd have to go digging through placed logos and art looking for what was causing these color swatches to appear in Quark.
Now there's a new problem with color swatches getting stuck in InDesign. You can even delete all placed art and these swatches stay there, you "select all unused" and InDesign correctly highlights the swatch as unused...but you can't trash it. The only solution is to create an EPS or PDF file with that color, place it into InDesign, then delete it. Fun times. It's making me less anal about making sure the swatches palette only contains actual colors actually used in the artwork.
― dan selzer, Friday, 23 April 2010 15:07 (fourteen years ago) link
it's not letting me password protect my airport express network wtf
anyone ever heard of this happening?
― Steve Sharta (cozen), Friday, 23 April 2010 23:24 (fourteen years ago) link
HALP I have a bunch of webpages with audio and video clips embedded with JW Player, and I need to bypass this stupid flash thing and get the media onto my computer. Isn't there a greasemonkey script for this? HALP
― piping hot dish and a cup of chat (Stevie D), Saturday, 24 April 2010 02:38 (fourteen years ago) link