Accelerate Your G4 Mac Under Leopard By 30% For $15...

[geeji]

Well, almost !

My 2005 G4 Mac Mini, running 10.5.8, was plagued with "CPU hogs", which for whatever reason, even when in background, would run amok and eat most of the available CPU, pushing it to 100% usage.
The worst offender by far was Firefox 3.6.x (Flash !), but others, like HP Device Monitor (coming with the Officejet 6500 printer) or Virtual PC also contributed.
Curiously the Intel versions of those programs did not seem to exhibit the same behavior on more recent Mac Minis, so there may be some OS contribution to that phenomenon.

But recently, while looking for "Jettison", I discovered "App Tamer", by St. Clair Software : this small system enhancer automatically suspends the Applications you designate when they move to background. In my case, instead of always running to close to 100% usage, I now have 70% or so of idle CPU, even when Firefox is opened; and my Mini/Leopard is now much more reactive.
Note that, obviously, when you have some heavy task (such as a long download), it is better to bring Firefox or the concerned application to the foreground, or to disable temporarily App Tamer for some minutes (1 click menu)...

So you may want to test this "un-decelerator", which can be downloaded for free and tried for 2 weeks before buying. Let us know if it works for you too

[macmanmacman]

and you know something interesting this sounds fishy to me i wouldn't use any app tamer at all because it could mess things up royal and what you need to understand is you need core image support which isn't available on the g4 mini this is why you have a huge load problem with the g4 mac mini

[Smithcraft]

Actually it is available. You have to have the last gen G4 minis though.

SC
_________________
Grumpy old man of computing.

[Desktop] G4 mini - 1.5Ghz 1GB 80GB HDD - Newer miniStack v2 500GB - 10.5.8

[Media System] Intel i5 mini - 2.33Ghz 8GB 500GB HDD - 4 x Hitachi 2TB HDD in a qBOX-SF - 10.7.5 (Thanks Phil!)

Make sure it has pins!

[geeji]