It looks like Apple may have read my mind, the upcoming release of Mac os X called “Snow Leopard” seems to be all about speed improvements.
And hopefully this will also be the release in which all of the numerous tiny little niggles and bugs will finally be resolved and ironed out, so the operating system feels smoother and slicker.
And heres a gratuitous picture for the sake of it, of a snow leopard just because theyre scrummy.
Heres a thought, Perhaps Also … Apple could donate £10.00 of the 10.6 operating system upgrade purchase price we would all pay, toward a foundation that preserves the habitat of the snow leopard ?
update looking activity monitor, it is clear mac os x is one of the most proflegate users of memory and especially virtual memory, in mine it appears almost every process has 500mb more of virtual memory allocated to it ? this must surely be an error ? with 1.44gb and 62 threads for the kernal alone. The problem with macos x in a way is it is a step back from the gui to a command based operating system, the real control we would like is in fact buried under commands.
Unlike mac os 9 where you could set control on memory requirements, for applications, and the amount of disk cache, where you could see how much memory the finder had allocated and how much of that it was actually using, through gui based controls, permissions for file control were much easier to control, and tend to work. uninstalling applications was easier, maintaining which elements of the system were running and allowed to run was also much easier, mac os x all this system level control is all very much behind the scenes, controlling what system processes start at startup is not done through an easy to use interface.
I begginning to realise i need to to reinstall my install of macos x because the disk cache accessing after a fresh startup of any application is insane, collecting mail using safari waiting for disk activity to finish after startup is hugely slow, to the extent that an old G4 machine running panther is much quicker at booting into safari from scratch, and all the disk activity must be wearing my internal drive out, because macos x is so virtual memory hungry.
Ive waited 5 years to find all the functional features of mac os 9 in macos X and what we tend have is a load of overrich features that barely work, and non of the basics working properly, an example of this would be finding a file by filename, which is very unreliable in macos x its like such a basic feature of an operating system but does it work properly in macos x first time everytime a resounding NO is the answer, and yet the fucking machine does content indexing when i havent asked it to !?! why is it trying to run when all im asking it to do is crawl properly first ? the inability to control content indexing properly or turn it off and have better performance for filename searching, is a priority.