# Optimizing and revamping my mac



## Macboy (Oct 2, 2004)

I have had my powermac g4 for almost 4 years now its a 733 with 768 megs of ram, nvidia4 graphics card. I simply love the machine, Ive never had problems up till now. The other day I had a kernel error where text scrolls down your screen with the only possible action is to restart. I have been looking in my activity monitor and I think there are a lot of things that arent supposed to be there.I need a mac pro to help me out with this one. If I put the cpu monitor up it doesnt have an even flow when nothing is happening it spikes up every 4 seconds. I have never used any anti spy or ad-aware software because I cant find any for free. Can anyone help me find out all this stuff it gets very confusing compared to OS 9. I look at my avtivity monitor and I see all kinds of things that I have no idea what they say. I have been using system ptimizer for mac for a while now does anyone know if this program is good and actually helps? I just feel like the old girl has got a big sluggish lately with some weird things happening and I have never had these problems before.

All help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Macboy :sad:


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## shuuhen (Sep 4, 2004)

System Optimizer? Never used it myself. Just read a description of it. It does do some things that can help. I used Disk Utility and some free apps like OnyX . A lot of people seem to like Cocktail . I haven't been able to try DiskWarrior or TechTool Pro in OS X yet, but I liked them in Mac OS 9 and earlier.

Unless it happens again, you probably don't need to worry about the kernel panic. What kind of things are in your activity log?

The CPU monitor spike could be because of background tasks. Probably don't need to worry about this either.

Spyware/adware is not a huge problem on Mac. The only removal programs I know of haven't been worked on in a long time. When they were still being developed I did try them, but I never actually got any spyware on my machine.


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