[LAmezq3984]

My buddy has a G4 powermac, its the one that can't use an airport extreme. Anyway, his computer starts up reallllly slow, and takes a long time to do anything. He has a 1.25 Ghz processor, 1024 mb RAM, and a 160g hard drive with hardly a gig of it used for storage. He rarely uses his computer for anything other than internet, and some photoshop work. I don't know what to look for to try and help him get his system operating speedily like it should. Oh yeah, one more thing, he is still running jaguar, which he has informed me he will upgrade, but I told him he might as well wait now for tiger. Anyway, can someone please tell me what to do? thank you so much for any and all help!

[Mac+]

Firstly, has your friend Reparied Permissions yet? This can be run from Disk Utility - which resides in Applications/Utilities - it can take a while, but it does help.

If you are not too confident using the CLI of the Terminal, then perhaps download MacJanitor and give that a run. This essentially does what the computer does when it restarts (I think) - hence the long start-up time your friend is experiencing.

Here's something to check out too: after one slow start-up time ask your friend to shutdown and reboot immediately - maybe the start up process will then be noticably quicker b/c the maintenance tasks and log files have been cleared up.