General video performance affected on Mac OSX 10.5 (PowerBook G4)

Question

I'm quite new to Mac and I just got a PowerBook G4 for free. I installed OSX 10.5 on it and for the first two weeks, everything was going kinda smooth even if this is similar to a P3. I'm not expecting awesome video performance but at least be able to watch some videos from Youtube.

Yesterday night, I installed Office 2008 for mac and this morning, even after a reboot, my computer is way much slower that I used to know. I watched a youtube video and the framevrate was 1:1. I also noticed it on flash adds, it's way slower!

Is there anything that I can do to increase video performance, see what's the process list running and taking more GPU or CPU, what's taking more ram and stuff like that?!

What do you guys, Mac pros, would do on an old laptop with OSX 10.5?

Answer 1

You can see CPU and RAM usage, among other things, in /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor.

Answer 2

Unfortunately, older computers are becoming less friendly in terms of UX. I have relegated my old Mac G4 to basic tasks like web hosting or other low CPU tasks. Flash has come to a resource standpoint of not even being friendly to the more powerful Pentium 4 with 1gb of ram. You can try downgrading your flash or upgrading some of the system components. Try uninstalling or limiting what programs are running simultaneously - even in the background. Resources are tight, and that is an old computer.

If you think the issue is related to Office 2008, try uninstalling, and using something like LibreOffice or Abiword.

Fun Ideas: Turn it into a picture frame, give it to a child for their first computer, put it on display somewhere to admire the elegance of the design(depending on the model), Run performance comparisons between it and a Raspberry Pi and post them to Youtube. Try experimenting with some distros of Linux if you still aren't satisfied with performance.