IPhoto 2 slow to open

Question

Hello everyone
iPhoto 2 takes around 7 minutes to open on my trusty 400MHz Powerbook 15" titanium running 10.3.9. Hasn't always done so, but happens without fail now. I click the icon in the dock then get a spinning disc for about 7 minutes until the rolls finally display, after which it operates as normal. I have already tried rebuilding the library (got a sore finger from holding down shift-option for 7 minutes). Does anyone know what's gone wrong here? I only have around 1100 photos totalling around 1030MB in the library, and it's all displayed in rolls by default, which would logically give the computer less work to do when initially opening the program.
To help you pitch your answer at an appropriate level, my knowledge of how Macs work on a scale of 1-10 is about 3, but getting better all the time...
Many thanks in advance for any help.
iMac 2.16 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 2GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM   Mac OS X (10.4.8)   Powerbook 15" titanium 400MHz PowerPC G4 384MB SDRAM Mac OS X (10.3.9)

Answer 1

I have 2.32 GB disk space left out of a total capacity of 9.37 GB , so about 24% free space. Is this enough to let things run OK?
No, it may not be, and this is why running OS X on a 10GB hard drive is quite impractical — especially if you use iPhoto, iTunes or iMovie, which create huge libraries of data.
A hard drive on which OS X is installed, and which is used as the primary startup drive for a Mac, really ought to have at least 5GB of available space on it at all times. You need that much to perform an Archive & Install of OS X, which under some circumstances is the appropriate remedy for OS corruption or other problems. You need at least that much to burn a single-sided DVD using either an internal DVD burner (which I your Tibook probably doesn't have) or an external burner. If you aren't concerned about being able to perform either of those operations, you can safely run with less than 5GB of free space on your startup drive — but the less free space you have, the more likely you are to run into slowdowns or worse problems, including the eventual loss of data. 2GB should be considered an absolute minimum under any and all circumstances, and 1GB is far into the danger zone. You are now very close to the minimum, and depending on your habits of usage and maintenance, you may be too close to expect your Powerbook to operate efficiently.
The less RAM you have, the more it matters how much free disk space is available, and the slower your Mac will run under all circumstances. 384MB of RAM is certainly not minimal, but if you had 512MB, 768MB or 1GB of RAM, your OS wouldn't need to make as much use of space on the hard drive for its swapfiles, and most operations would run faster. And if you had a larger hard drive, you'd be able to store a lot more photos and other data, update or upgrade your software freely, and install new applications before you needed to worry about how little free space remained on the drive.
If I were you, I'd replace the 10GB hard drive ASAP with at least a 30-40GB unit. They are now ridiculously cheap: for well under $100 USD, you could have a much larger, faster and quieter drive, and installation is so easy it's described right in your Powerbook Getting Started user's manual.