I have a customer complaining that the G5's they've been using since January are slower than the Mac OS 9 G4's they upgraded from. They're running Photoshop, Illustrator, and Quark.
I don't know the clock speed, but I think they have about a GB of RAM in each machine (Kingston). I'm going to recommend they upgrade toe Tiger, and perhaps CS2. Anybody have any other suggestions?
most of the time, an OS gets bogged down. Also, repair permissions, Delete temp. cache.
Try Tiger Cache Cleaner.
Add more ram. I have a GB in my G4 here, and I suck it up *VERY* fast when working in PS7, much less CS, which uses more memory, plus the other apps. If they are running any of those at the same time, I would advise 2GB of ram.
What video cards do they have with what displays/resolutions? In OSX, the video card plays an important role in just day to day work, as QE is handled by the video card, and slower cards can be bogged down when runing at higher resolutions with lots of windows on screen.
Tiger may speed some things up, but I would not move a production machine over to it until some bugs are hammered out. 10.4.1 fixed a few, but still quite a few there.
I had a similar problem where I work. Essentially we added 2GB ram to each machine and did a clean install of Mac OS 10.3 (upgraded to .9). The computers are performing much better now.
I'm waiting until 10.4.2 comes out before I even bother looking at Tiger.