This whole thing is getting pretty, um... old. MacOS 8 is slower, much slower on a 68k, no matter which way you, um... look at it. Much slower than MacOS 7. If you want your computer to um... really show its age, then use MacOS 8. Otherwise, use MacOS 7.
On my faster '040s, such as my Quadra 840AV, 8.1 is only very slightly slower than the 7's. So minimally that it's worth it to me. Now on something with a 25mhz '040, maybe I might not, but with enough memory on the faster '040s the slowdown is barely noticable. I do run 7.1 on my Duo 280c, however, because it is noticably faster than even 7.5.5 with no real loss of features.
Um... And MacOS 8 on my 6100/66 does not seem anywhere near as slow as it does on my Quadra 800. It feels snappy and perfectly at home, whereas um... on the Quadra it feels like the machine is constantly struggling. Any shortcomings from 68k bits in MacOS 8 are entirely, um... invisible even on the slowest of the PowerPC machines, in my experience.
The 6100/66 is, by clock speed alone, quite a bit faster than the fastest '040. Combine that with the faster overall processing of the PPC, plus the bits of PPC code there are in 8.1, it's quite natural it would be faster. The 68k bits in 8.1 are naturally transparently emulated, and although the 6100/66 would have one of the slower emulators it's quite likely it would match a 33/40mhz '040 for most things. If there was a way to hack out the PPC bits from 8.5 and stuff them in place of the 68k code in 8.1, it'd be even faster, but overall 8.5+ adds enough while being more PPCish that they tend to even out, or end up slightly slower.
Anyway, one of the interesting phenomena of human experience is perception of speed. There are people that are perfectly happy with OS X on a 233mhz Beige G3, while there are others who can't live with it on a 400mhz B&W G3. Likewise there are people who are perfectly happy with 8.1 on a stock Duo 230 with 24 megs of RAM, while others find 7.1 (or anything) on a 40mhz Quadra sluggish. What works for one person might not work for another, what is a perfectly acceptable tradeoff of speed for someone is useless fluff for others.
Um... Slow is how 8.1 feels on any 68k, and I can hardly believe that anyone would argue otherwise.
See above. Just because it feels slow to you doesn't mean it's slow to everyone, or is unacceptably slow. Slow is a relative term. Slow is Windows 98 on a 386 ;)
I'm in a bad mood now so nevermind my anti-sarcasim sarcasim.
:)
Scott Holder
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