Slow iBook G4 (hard disk?)

[Rikintosh]

I recently purchased an iBook G4 12" 1.33ghz. It's the fastest 12 inch ibook out there. I did all the servicing, thermal grease, cleaning, and a new 100gb toshiba hard drive.

However, I notice that when I turn it on, it stays for several seconds on a gray screen before the apple, for me this is unusual, since my other macs don't have this "delay". But I tolerate. The big problem is when I leave it idle and it sleeps, or when I close the lcd and open it again, it will be frozen (but with the mouse pointer working) for 15, 30 seconds! It's like the HD has stopped responding.

No, it's not a problem with my hard drive, it's 100% bug free, and it worked like a charm on another windows computer.

I once observed something similar when I used a slave hd (or cable select, I don't remember) on a PMG4 733, I changed a jumper and the system was much better. But on laptop hard drives, I never needed to use jumpers, and I believe the jumperless setting means master.

I'm using OSX 10.4.11, and I've already checked the connection between the hd and the motherboard 3 times, it's perfect.

 

[MrCheeto]

The gray screen before Apple is more common than not. I don't think I would consider that an issue. You could, however, ensure that your Mac isn't searching for the boot disk by going into System Preferences, Startup Disk, and ensuring that your internal HD is highlighted. If not, click it and then close System Preferences. Whenever I change something on any of my Macs and this setting is effected, I always notice a difference.

As for waking, that could have to do with sleep preferences. The sleep functions depend on many things. Hard drive free space, RAM installed, battery percentage, power saver settings etc. You should look into sleep settings on this forum and several guides to get a better understanding of how this can have such a great effect on responsiveness. I was always frustrated that my 13" MacBook Pro (2008 or 2009) would hibernate when the lid was closed. This would cause it to take ages to wake with symptoms similar to yours. I couldn't stand it so I did Terminal mods to change my hibernation settings so that it would only hibernate if the battery was below a certain percentage. I've had mixed results with sleep obeying these changes all the way up to my 2012 MacBook Air. Now that the M1's are fast beyond reason, the issue is moot. I did struggle with these settings to the bitter end, though.

Where did you get a new Toshiba IDE drive?

 

[Rikintosh]

I had completely reset the pram, I believe it was just using factory settings.

I live in Brazil, and here is known for having a stupid and bureaucratic legislation. Sometimes I find auctions of goods that landed here but that had some problem with the bureaucracy, and for that reason they are piled up in containers for 10, 20 years, until the judicial process is concluded. Then someone snaps up at auction, and sells them. Recently I even saw a guy selling several sony wega CRT televisions in their original boxes.

I got this 100gb toshiba, 2 80gb seagate and one 160gb samsung, all ide/pata. I know that there are ssd ide solutions nowadays, but here they cost considerably more than a hard drive.

 

[MrCheeto]

This reminds me of issues trading with Thailand. Something about exporting US steel to certain countries. Now we're all restoring old Japanese bikes and in disbelief that the old parts can be had brand-new from Thailand but that's because Thailand's market hasn't really changed since the 1960's.

but here they cost considerably more than a hard drive.

I have the inverse issue. SSD's are cheap but I like a spinning drive. I think I will start searching Brazilian auctions.

 

[Rikintosh]

This reminds me of issues trading with Thailand. Something about exporting US steel to certain countries. Now we're all restoring old Japanese bikes and in disbelief that the old parts can be had brand-new from Thailand but that's because Thailand's market hasn't really changed since the 1960's.



I have the inverse issue. SSD's are cheap but I like a spinning drive. I think I will start searching Brazilian auctions.

I like spinning drives, I've recovered lots and lots with hdd regenerator and HDAT. I believe that the delay caused by accessing the hd on some systems (such as 486, pentium 1) is part of the nostalgia.

 

[MrCheeto]

Did Startup Disk selection improve booting?