Sometimes, a downgrade is an upgrade

July 31, 2007 on 10:56 pm | In Computing |

My main desktop computer is my 12″ Powerbook with a G4 processor. Pretty outdated, especially since the G5 processor never made it into Apple laptops. With all the nifty software I installed, my Powerbook kept getting slower and slower until I could barely work with OpenOffice or NeoOffice anymore. That is, my laptop’s speed was okay when I had just freshly booted it, but having several applications open made it painfully slow, especially when I didn’t turn it off for a couple days and had it sleep mode only.

Now one of the sermons you get to hear from Apple fanboys is about how longlasting the hardware is how fast current software still runs on their ancient Mac. I was always a sceptic since applications simply tend to get bigger for numerous reasons.

Either way, last weekend I reformated my Powerbooks harddrive and reinstalled Mac OS 10.3 (Panther) instead of 10.4 (Tiger). I hardly use Spotlight and Widgets anyway. By means of Apple’s software update I get the current versions of most of the software anyway (e.g. iTunes) and most applications don’t require 10.4, so the downgrade brings no cut-back in terms of software. Especially easy was rebuilding my system; making a backup of my Library and all my important files and then paste the relevant folders into my freshly installed system was all it took to bring back my carefully crafted iTunes playlists and photo albums. And yes, it’s fast, a lot faster. I only reinstalled the most useful applications I use on a daily basis to trim the fat in my system and it perfectly worked. I thought about buying a new Mac for my desk soon, but now I feel comfortable with waiting longer - a lot longer. And yes, the propaganda about outdated Macs still doing remarkably well with current software are true.

For those of you who care, here’s my application listing to get the most of your G4 processor:

Mac OS 10.3.9 (Panther)
Adium (instant messaging, current)
Adobe Photoshop CS2 (not so current, but it has more than you need anyway )
Camino (webbrowsing doesn’t get leaner than that)
iTerm (the default Terminal would do the job, but iTerm is prettier)
NeoOffice (why install an outdated Microsoft Office?)
ScummVM (a must for every computer)
Skype (current)
SubEthaEdit (coding doesn’t get better than this)
Transmit (FTP client)
VLC (another must for every computer)

Together with the apps that come preinstalled with OS X there isn’t really anything left uncovered for an ordinary working computer. This one will do another couple years.