Keeping my Mac Mini Optimized

Question

Hi all, I was one of the early adaptors to the Mac Mini. I have a 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4 machine running 512MB of RAM. I'm running MAC OS X 10.4.11.
It seems like over time, after numerous upgrades to the OS either automatically from Apple or when I purchased Tiger, in addition many automatic upgrades to Safari and MS Office, my machine seems to have become sluggish more frequently to where the "spinning beach ball" happens more frequently. I remember in the beginning, I could use the Mini for all things and leave it running for weeks without having a performance drop off that would require a restart. Now it seems like on a matter of a few days.
I will occasionally run the disk utility to verify & repair permissions, but I'm not sure if that helps. I do see, using the Activity Monitor, that the system memory gets pretty low where free memory is only 18 - 20 MB as I write.
Again, my overall usage has not changed dramatically since owning the Mini, so I'm not sure if the new versions of the OS, Safari, MS Office, etc. installed over the last two or three years just run "fatter" with perhaps more memory leak than the earlier versions.
Is there another way I should be optimizing my Mini on a regular basis? Do the new versions of the OS and apps along with their various upgrades create a situation where the original 512MB of memory is no longer adequate?
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks

Answer 1

Each version of OS X has wanted more memory and each has become both more efficient as the codebase has matured but also more power hungry as new features and abilities have been added. So the hardware reasons for your slowdown are that memory requirements have increased as have the CPU and graphics requirements. Additionally, depending on how you performed your upgrades, you may have unintentionally sabotaged your system a little. Finally, while you may think you aren't using your computer any differently than you used to, most Mac users over time do change their habits a little, running more programs at once rather than quitting one when starting another, and adding little utilities and plug-ins here and there.
If your slowdown is bugging you I'd recommend that you consider the following: purchase an external FW hard drive and install your OS and software on it. Don't copy or clone - perform a fresh install of your important stuff. Boot from this external drive and see how it feels. The FW drive is going to be a bit faster than the internal drive - you should notice that it starts up faster and that large programs like Word will too. The fresh OS and install of applications might also provide a bit of a boost. Since you are using Word (which is bloated) the additional memory would also be worth it. Chances are, for about $200 you'll see a modest improvement plus once you've fully moved into the external drive you'll be able to use the mini's internal drive for performing regular backups.
Or perhaps it is just time to look into buying a new/refurb computer?