I just replaced my iMac G3 400mhz (1 gig of ram) with an eMac G4 700mhz (768MB of ram).
The eMac felt slower in all uses than my iMac G3. Including scrolling through eBay, opening and closing windows etc. So I went to find benchmarks on the 'net. I found XBench 1.3. I downloaded it and ran the test. After the test is finished you upload the test (including your macs specs to the website).
You than can compare it with other macs on the website. It showed exactly what I was feeling. That it was half as slow as my G3. I compared it to one on the site and also compared it to another eMac G4 700mhz and it still showed all benchmarks were half slower.
How can this be? What would be causing this.
I think I used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my iMac G3 to the hard drive of the eMac. Is this the reason. The ROM file? My eMac thinks it is an iMac G3?
Anyone have any ideas?
MaxTek
if i were u, i would try a reinstall of the os.
Given that you shifted your system software from one generation of machine to another, you should have been amazed that it even booted. The machines were close relatives, but there is that little thing called a system software installer. The installer picks the most appropriate modules for your Mac, which, err, you don't appear to have.
Not the Mac world, but in the Microsoft world, you would run the Sysprep utility to reinvoke hardware setup (as would happen during a clean OS install). For quick and dirty, run a hardware re-setup; for contentment, re-install the OS.
Well the mac os rom file for the iMac DV and the eMac 700 must be the same because it has been running every day, even after hard boots.
The sucky part is I did get the benchmarks to match the other benchmarks for my machine specs on the website by quitting every running app except the finder.
Running OS 10.4.8 with 768megs of ram (15 gigs of HD space left) and using Safari, Mail, Dashboard, Finder and Internet Connect give a bench mark of 8.36. Quitting everything gives a benchmark of 23.46
That is a huge fall in performance. 768megs of ram should be enough to not bog down the eMac.
MaxTek
I think I have finally found a solution. Today for some reason I decided to check Activity Monitor. It showed "kernel_task" was robbing more than 50% of my cpu power. I googled "kernel_task" and others have posted the same problem I am having...a slow as molasses G4. From 10.0.3 all the way up to 10.4
Some of the posts were back to 2004! The fix was turning off applications that load at startup via your accounts login items in the system preferences. I had 4 of them.
I deleted all the login items and now have a normal eMac again.
UPDATE:
Normal until I started up TurboMac Acellerator. It is a dialup accellerator from Fastermac.net (Other World Computing).
As soon as I start it up kernel_task CPU usage goes nuts again. It is currently at 47.00% in Activity Monitor. When I quit TurboMac it drops like a stone to .5-1.70%.
I use TurboMac everyday. I still use dialup and with TurboMac surfing the web is completely fine, plus it is only 89 bucks a year. I don't remember having this problem when I signed up for TurboMac. It seems like it has started in the last 6-8 months.