>>Yeah, interesting that the 5300 is probably a lot of folks' '2nd Mac' -
>>because they're a cheap PPC portable that do most everyday things fairly
>>well. Hope they're all running SpeedDoubler though. Seriously.
>
>I tried Speed Doubler on a 5300 runnning system 8.6 and found NO benefit
>and the underlined menus were annoying. I removed it.
>Am I missing an amazing feature? Please, what benefit is Speed Doubler with
>system 8.6, which is almost all native?
Paul Fuchs on comp.sys.mac.portables has run some speed tests with the
5300 + SD 8. MacWorld originally did with SD 1.x in 1995. I've also done
some tests, although not to the extent Paul has. Paul tested Finder
functions with a stopwatch w/ w/o SD 8, as well as apps such as Word,
Excel, Netscape etc.
Paul found that SD 8 doubled the speed of most application launches (or
close to 2x) or, in some Finder functions, even trebled performance. This
is absolutely beyond dispute. This is esp. so in non-native apps like
Word 5.1 - launching it was painful until I got SD (48 hours after I
bought the 5300). Without SD, screen redraws on a 5300 (or a 1400/117)
are abysmally slow. If you can't see any difference, you clearly need a
faster PowerBook. If you don't like underlined menus, switch it off.
OS 8.5 is only 54% PPC native. 8.6 is a little more, but not much. Use I
Love Native, just as a basic guide to which CPs & extensions are not
native. Such as:
- Extensions manager
- Trackpad
- CD/DVD driver
- Photo access
- Audio CD access
- File Sharing extension
- iTunes QT extension
- QT Java extras (QT 5.2)
Of course, these are not as important as 68K assembly code embedded in
the system suitcase and the Finder. Every time the system makes a call to
something that has(or requires) 68K code, there's a consequential
slowdown. It may be only nanoseconds, but there's stuff that Apple simply
can't take out. As a result, the system overhead is higher than it might
be and, thus, the OS is not as fast as it might be with a given CPU.
The process manager did not go native until OS 9; the file manager was
not native until OS 9. While OS 8 introduced improved disc caching,
rendering SD's scheme unnecessary, the SD emulator emulates a 68040,
whereas the Apple emulator in ROM only emulates a 68020 (mostly for
backward compatibility).
Cheers,
RD
Remy Davison
Contributing Editor, Insanely-Great Mac <http://www.insanely-great.com>
mail: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
RD's PowerBook page: <http://www.macpowerbook.com>
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