# help speeding up ibook G3 dual USB (2001) ?



## ozziesironman (Jun 30, 2010)

so ive been on my laptop a lot more lately than my desktop (which is a shame, since i just put in a new hard drive and video card.. oh well it is what it is), and ive noticed that this thing is MUCH slower than im used to. so i started to experiment with ways to speed it up.

i did a fresh reload with no optional languages or fonts or printer drivers selected. 
i disabled spotlight and rebooted, which made a night and day difference, but still a bit laggy. 
i installed shadowkiller and turned the color depth to 16bit, that helped a lot
i removed kexts from S/L/E that i dont need (most of em haha), made booting MUCH faster, almost as fast as my buddys MBP
i upgraded the memory to 640MB (max). that made a big difference
put in an airport card and stopped using the netgear USB wireless dongle, that made a difference online. 

only thing i havent tried is upgrading the hard drive. its still using the stock 20GB 4200RPM drive from Apple. 
a question regarding the drive: i know theres a 120GB limit on disks on these pre-2002 ibooks, but ive read that you can get around that by formatting bigger drives into partitions of 120GB or less. (supposedly a guy got a 320GB drive working by partitioning it into like 4 different partitions). is that possible, or am i stuck with a 120GB or less drive? im not afraid of taking this apart. (would a 5200rpm or even a 7200rpm make a HUGE difference?)

aside from the drive, is there anything else i could do to speed up this old, tired G3? or am i stuck with it until i decide to put it out in the pasture? 
ive read about overclocks (icook) but that doesnt work with this 750CX processor. (i believe its a CX). does overclocking these things a tad bit actually do anything, or is it a waste of time and effort? (other than this whole G3 speed up project being a waste of time and effort.. i realize that haha). 
here are the specs
Apple iBook Dual USB (white). 2001. 
PowerPC 600MHz
640MB SDRAM
8MB ATI Rage M3
Mac OS X 10.4.11
Apple Airport
4200rpm 20GB stock hard drive from Apple. 
DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive. 
Windows 3.1 installed in Q Guest PC (so i can play sim city classic)
Windows 98 SE installed in Q Guest PC (for experimental purposes.. mostly so i can say 'lookie what i did! i was bored.. hehe)

and somehow, unreal tournament 99 runs better in openGL than the rest of the system does... AHAHAHA! dont know how, just food for thought.


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

Since you already know what you have, and are into, then I'll tell you like it is. It's a G3, you've got all you're going to get out of it. In fact, you've done more then I'd of thought to do. What ktext did you yank out? 
Anywho, as for a drive, I noticed a difference going from 5400 to 7200 rpm drive in my MacBook. It won't be huge, but it'll be nice. If you gat a drive from OWC they have software that helps you get around the 120GB limit. But as for formatting it in smaller chucks, I've tried it and never got it to work. As for overclocking, I wouldn't bother, it'll just bring the iBook to a speedy death from heat.


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## ozziesironman (Jun 30, 2010)

sinclair_tm said:


> Since you already know what you have, and are into, then I'll tell you like it is. It's a G3, you've got all you're going to get out of it. In fact, you've done more then I'd of thought to do. What ktext did you yank out?
> Anywho, as for a drive, I noticed a difference going from 5400 to 7200 rpm drive in my MacBook. It won't be huge, but it'll be nice. If you gat a drive from OWC they have software that helps you get around the 120GB limit. But as for formatting it in smaller chucks, I've tried it and never got it to work. As for overclocking, I wouldn't bother, it'll just bring the iBook to a speedy death from heat.


as for the kexts, i just looked in profiler at the kexts that are loaded, and removed ones i wasnt using... the backlight control, the geforce kexts, the radeon kexts, the intel specific ones (intelcpupowermanagement etc) basically any kexts that were loaded, stayed, and the ones that werent being reported, got deleted. (minus the portables kexts.. phonedriversupport, ipod, etc) 
good to know about the hard drive stuff... i was just planning on buying a drive from newegg or whatever... ill definitely check out OWC. thanks for the tip.
i also force enabled QE (or whatever it is... QE2d or whatever.. the dev thing) and that REALLY gave the interface some bump.

one more thing.. when i googled on how to speed up the interface, there was an interesting topic on a hackintosh forum about how the SMBIOS and model identifiers changed the performance of the machine, and that got me thinking of a possible way to speed up my real mac. is it possible to change the model identifier on a real mac to optimize the performance, or is that only an x86 wannabe mac type thing?


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

As far as I know, model identifiers are hard coded in the hardware on a Mac, not something you can change, but this is out of my realm.


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## ozziesironman (Jun 30, 2010)

Ok, prob wouldn't be worth it Nyway. Thanks for the advice


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