A thread for boring computer questions.

My wife and I have an old (about 6 years old) Powerbook. A few years ago, I accidentally poured water into it and it developed some issues (mainly some of the keys not working), and we ended up buying a new Macbook because I was going back to school and needed a reliable computer. The Powerbook was mostly left in a closet. However, now I work from home and my wife doesn't have a job = we have been using both laptops, with my wife on the Powerbook. All of the keys are working again, which is nice. However, it's very sluggish. I don't know if this is because of the water incident, or just because it's an older laptop with lots of crap on the hard drive.

Basically all we need the Powerbook to be able to do is run the Internet and maybe run Word, but hopefully at a better speed. What can we do, in terms of clearing files off the computer or whatever, to try and make this laptop run faster? What is the most efficient way to do this? Is there a way to just zap everything off the hard drive, or reset it to factory standard or something? Is this a bad idea? I realize that if this is a physical problem, there isn't much we can do.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

actually i don't rc. should be pretty easy

hm alright.

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

do that, then wipe and reinstall. it will go like the clappers.

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.

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.

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?

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?

are the grayscale and colour images different sizes (in bytes) as JPGs/in photoshop, etc.?

the greyscale will be indexed and lossless, the jpeg will be lossy.

The images in both documents are native Photoshop files, no lossy file formats used in my ID documents. The color images are CMYK.

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.

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)

Which post? Likely there's script injection there that's fucking with the stylesheet.

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 center
is 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

Is it still happening?

(There was a rogue "<div>" tag in that post that was throwing off the formatting of the page.)

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.

i took a grab:

http://www.mullsports.com/images/ilxpage.jpg

lol there was more than one <div> in that post

is it still happening?

fixed ! you the man

yay! Now about my PDFs.

lol, sorry dude

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.

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).

do you want your grayscale pdfs to be 3x bigger than colour pdfs: y/n?

haha, always remember to make sure the "grayscale is hueg" option is turned off

caek -- definitely no.

This will make a portion of my job much easier.

what the fuck is the point of RAR? seriously

could be wrong but i think it's always had better self-checking / integrity features than ZIP, especially for multipart archivess

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.

also if you are ~missing~ any one part

RAR manages non-Latin characters correctly, ZIP does not.

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

it's not pointless at all today, especially considering that every free file host has a file size limit, ahem.

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.

wth stylesheet is that ste? my eyes!

RAR manages non-Latin characters correctly, ZIP does not.

Yeah this is U+K.

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".

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.

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.

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".

there's an app for that: http://www.panic.com/blog/2010/02/shrinkit-1-0/ (10.6+ only)

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.

me too. 10.5 for all time.

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.

it's not letting me password protect my airport express network wtf

anyone ever heard of this happening?