LW making my mac click!

In the past couple of weeks (after i installed the newer version) It freezes up my mac and a funny soumd comes out of it like I'm trying to play a broken cd? Is that damaging my computer? Should I get rid of limewire?

[philippe99]

Hi
(1) how does it freeze your mac ?
Can you "force to quit "LW and continue to play with your machine ?
Do you have a several languages message asking to reboot your machine (system error message following a Kernel Panic; example
(2) Do you have no message but still forced to manually reboot the machine (power off then power on) ?

(2) about the "special sound"
Which stuff plays this sound ? LW itself, alone, when you do nothing ?
Or a downlaoded MP3 you try to play (which would say that the file is corrupted)
Out of LW, if you play a MP3 (from iTunes for example), iss the sound also "choppy" ?

And last but not least, Douj, may we know a little bit more about your machine + OS ?

Regards
Phil

(1) how does it freeze your mac ?
Can you "force to quit "LW and continue to play with your machine ?

It is completely frozen for 5 to 10 minutes

(2) Do you have no message but still forced to manually reboot the machine (power off then power on) ?

no.

(3) about the "special sound"

It is coming out of the mac itself. Like the hard drive is about to blow.

I am using a g4 with os x (10.3.9) jaguar
I have two 450 gig external hard drives.
I don't have much space left on G4 System.
Only 3.5 gigs left. Could that be the problem?
And I moved my shared folder to G4 Storage.
Could my firewall settings cause it?


thanks

[Lord of the Rings]

philippe99 will be better able to answer your questions. But as a note: 3.5 GB available is too little!!! All mac osx programs use virtual memory (VM) where they store temp memory to the hard disk drive. LW also needs space & the longer it's on the more VM it needs.

Also, external drives can be a little slow at times. So saving to an external drive from LW 'might' be an issue. (But might not also.)

If I were you, I'd free up more space on your HDD. Try to have over 10 GB available without programs running. You'll need to evaluate what needs to stay & what can be moved over to the external drives. Likewise I'm considering moving much of my iTunes library to external drive. I've already moved it off the OSX partition & HDD I have onto another internal drive.

Are there anytools that clean up worthles stuff like cache or /temp/ files?

[Lord of the Rings]

If you're refering to Virtual memory, then no. Once you close/quit a program then that space used up is returned (both RAM & VM.) VM is simply a way of storing information which might otherwise have been stored in your RAM. (I have a utility which is supposed to clean up the use of ram & turbo charge selected programs but I have suspicions it doesn't really work! Which is why they decided to offer it for free after many complaints. lol )

As far as utilities that create temp files, generally if they are a responsible program they will have an option in their preferences which will give you an option for how long to keep temp files. This is generally used with programs such as video/multimedia converters, etc.) Most will delete these temp files after the end of the process or after quitting the program. Temp files being different to VM but has the same effect of using up space.

Part of an issue with LW for OSX using a lot of VM is as a result of OSX's Java. From what I've heard the new Tiger, OS 10.4 now has Java 1.5 & is more memory efficient. Also I believe the LW developers are working on this VM issue for the next release; ie: so Java doesn't use up quite as much VM space.

So should I download tiger from LW? I have never upraded to a newer OS before. Will I have my same stuff? Or could it just destroy my computer?


Now I have 7.23 gigs left. I cleared up a bunch o stuff.

[philippe99]

Douj,

(1) about free space
My personal rule is to let free, at least, 2 times the space used by the installed OS
Panther, if you do not have suppress languages and printers drivers, will use nearly 2.5G.
And I give to my friends the following easy-to-memorize advice (for Panther):always let 4-5G free.

(2) about cleaning cache,...
CacheOut X

(3) manually running the Apple maintenance scripts (if your mac is not on between 3AM - 5AM):
Macjanitor

(4) about Tiger; Tiger is not a free update, you'll have to buy it
Your Panther 10.3.9 is a good OS for your G4 and I'm not sure you'll need to go to Tiger: my daugther runs Panther on my old G3 and runs LW fine.
The shared folder is located to an external FW drives (as its Itunes Library) to avoid the G3 internal hard drive to run out space

So in short
* always let 5G free
* put the big files (movies, Itunes library, ...) on your external drives
* runs Macjanitor on a daily base to ensure best performances of your machine

For any problem, questions: The Bible of Dr Smoke

A remark: use CacheOut to clean you browser caches and other normal caches. Do not use CacheOut to clean you system caches on a daily base because this specific feature of CacheOut (which requires the admin password) is a hard procedure including a reboot: only use this extreme feature if you face big boot-sleep problems

So, with all this, I hope you G4 is ready for a new life

Phil