Suggestions for VERY sluggish timeline?
Does anyone have any ideas for how to remedy a very sluggish timeline? I have searched this forum and I've seen problems with FCP 5 and Tiger that sound similar to mine, but I'm running FCP 4.5 and OS 10.3.9.
My timeline has slowed to the point where I can barely use the drag and drop functions anymore. When I do, and two clips butt up next to eachother, I get the pinwheel for a few seconds before I can drop the clip and when I do, it generally shifts past where I wanted to drop it - even in snapping mode!
You can forget about using slip and slide - these have been rendered useless. Right now, I am forced to use the blade tool, cut the selected clip out of the timeline and paste it in where I want it. What a pain!
My timelines are not that long - only 20 minutes. the only suspicion I have is that all my media is running off of firewire drives, rather than internals. But it's the internal drive that is spinning when the timeline hangs up. The other thing I've noticed is that this doesn't happen nearly as badly when I am working on a 30fps timeline, as opposed to the 24fps timeline that I am working in now.
Any ideas? It's not a processor issue (dual 2.5 ghz) or a RAM issue (2.5 ghz RAM). What's up?!???!
There are many reasons why we ALL get dropped frames on playback. Some have been addressed here.
For me, I always seem to get them when I'm viewing on external monitor and don't have things rendered properly. A small crossfade that "looks" rendered but is only actually 'kind-of-rendered' so it plays in RT can easily clog playback so you get dropped frame warnings. Do you have ANY non rendered things in the timeline? If you don't want to go through and trash your render files and re-render... at least do Command-A -- Option-R... the Option R should render out everything to FULL render and not just what FCP things it needs to render it to to get it to play in your RT settings... FCP's often wrong there.
CaptM
Similar Messages
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Very sluggish timeline response with avchd & 990x + 24G RAM+ 580gtx?
Hi All,
Following months of research and now recently purchasing the components , I have just built the following spec machine to edit AVCHD. 990x + 24G Corsair dominator RAM + 10K velociraptor OS drive + asus rampage 3 extreme + 6 x1T 7200 rpm Seagate barracudas (that were meant to be in raid 5 but I just cant get the software RAID to operate).
I have imported about an hour of avchd footage onto the timeline and when I click in different places on the timeline the video preview takes close to a second to update. When I scrub the timeline its just not clean and seems to be laboring.
When I did the same test with DV footage captured from my PD170 the system is perfectly responsive.
I set up the drives as C: OS + CS5
6 x 1T sata 7200rpm seagate barracudas, and I have set Video previews, Audio previews, Footage, Project file, etc each to its own clean separate drive.
This is a brand new clean system with only windows 7 and purchased version of CS5.5 installed.
A) Please can someone help me work through this AVCHD response issue?
B) Would it help the timeline response to get the software RAID 5 up and running on the 6 x 1T 7200 rpm drives? if so please help with guidence on this becuase whenever I have tried to set up the array in the BIOS, when I boot into windows 7 it wants to initialise the disk.
After a few hours one of the disks come up as failed. ( I have tried replacing with new drives, but the process repeats itself)
My goal is that I really need to be able to edit AVCHD footage with near instant timeline response.
Thanks very much
Kind regards
Anthony Freeman
www.freemanproductions.co.zaRj and Scott Thanks
Right so Ive set up the 2 x Raid 0 arrays, and I have allocated them as simple drives, as instructed, the problem now is as follows.
I booted up premier and tried to assign the various preview and scratch disks as follows a get an error based on this setup below:
Drive Letter
Description
Designation Path in Premier CS5
C:
OS and Premier - WD 10k velociraptor
Location of Premier project file
H:
Generic Backup drive - 1 Terebyte seagate barracudda 7200 sata
Captured Video + Captured Audio
I:
Anthony Raid 1 (RAID 0) - comprising 2 x 1t seagate barracudda 7200 sata
Video Previews
J:
Anthony Raid 2 (RAID 0) - comprising 2 x 1t seagate barracudda 7200 sata
Audio Previews
H:
Generic Backup drive -1 Terebyte seagate barracudda 7200 sata
The error says:
Question 1: How do I make the scratch disks unwriteprotected?
Question 2: Are my Designation selections in premier for the Audio/ Video previews/ project files all correct?
Your help would be greatly appreciated.
Kind regards
Anthony Freeman -
Suggestions for Very Large Hierarchy
Hello,
We have general ledger information with accounts and transactions that we are loading into BI, and we were told to use SAP's hierarchy structure - however that seems to be limited to 50,000 - 100,000 nodes, and the file we are using has 7.5 million records. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to set up a hierarchy of this size?
Thanks!There are many reasons why we ALL get dropped frames on playback. Some have been addressed here.
For me, I always seem to get them when I'm viewing on external monitor and don't have things rendered properly. A small crossfade that "looks" rendered but is only actually 'kind-of-rendered' so it plays in RT can easily clog playback so you get dropped frame warnings. Do you have ANY non rendered things in the timeline? If you don't want to go through and trash your render files and re-render... at least do Command-A -- Option-R... the Option R should render out everything to FULL render and not just what FCP things it needs to render it to to get it to play in your RT settings... FCP's often wrong there.
CaptM -
Premiere Elements 10 sluggish Timeline...why?
I just built a new computer with:
-Windows 7 Professional
-Intel Core i7-3770
8GB DDR3 RAM
SanDisk 128 SSD
WD Blue 1TB 7200RPM HDD
GTX 650 1GB (I know not necessary since PreE doesn't use it for rendering)
Specifically, when I am using the timeline, zooming in and out, moving it to the left and right, it becomes very sluggish. Also, when I move the time line cursor it lags behind significantly. My Project setting is on DV - Standard 48kHz. My video is in AVI format approxamatly an hour long. This is very surprising since before I was editing on my 2009 Macbook Pro 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 8GB, 500HDD. On my Macbook I was editing Raw DV footage with Hard Disk, Flash Memory Camcorders - Standard 48kHz project setting. I had no lag what so ever in respect to what I experienced on my PC build. What could be the matter with it? During editing, I have the CPU meter and GPU meter(I know PreE doesn't use GPU for rendering) on as well but that's about it. I upgraded my editing computer to experience faster rendering and export times not to have to trade off for a sluggish timeline experience! Help!!!Recent generations of SSD's are quite good, and their capacities have gone up, plus the price has gone down. Their reliability for long-term writing has also improved greatly. Having one as the system/boot disc is a good move, and I recommend having all programs, the OS and probably the Page File (Windows Virtual Memory) on one.
I use HDD's for both my Project and Scratch disks, and then another for my media, for a 3x arrangement, i.e. C:\SSD, D:\SATA III HDD, E:\SATA III HDD.
Spreading the I/O load will usually greatly improve overall performance, and that appears to be what you have done already. The performance gain is biggest, if one goes from just one disc, to two, with a much smaller impact, if they add 3, or more. Personally, I like the 3x (or more) arrangement, but the Bang For The Buck is less, than just adding a second physical HDD. At a point, there are diminishing returns, and when one gets to a bunch of multiple drives, even in RAID, the user does not see THAT much of an improvement, though they do show up in benchmarks.
Unless you have partitioned any of your drives, I do not think that your C:\SSD and D:\SATA (II, or III) HDD's will be the bottleneck. You don't have any partitons, do you?
For performance of the GUI, I find that the video driver (so long as one has at least 1GB VRAM) is the first bottleneck. Next can be installed RAM, but with a 64-bit OS and at least 8GB RAM, most RAM bottlenecks will not show up, until one goes to Share/Publish the Timeline. Then, more RAM can improve things, but that is not seen in the GUI performance.
You have already ruled out the video driver (the main cause for GUI display issues), and have a good I/O sub-system, so I am at a loss to explain what you are seeing. Maybe some real hardware gurus will see a bottleneck, and can advise you on how to handle things.
Good luck,
Hunt -
Does anyone have a suggestion for an alternative to iCal that will interface with the Cloud so it works on the iPhone and the Macbook? I find iCal to be poorly designed and not very efficient. I waste a lot of time entering information because you can't go to a specific day and enter information, nor can you navigate between months and add information on a specific date by clicking on the date. You can't easily scroll month-to-month and once you do by scrolling through nine months to get to where you want to be, you cannot enter information by clicking on a specific day in the month and entering information. I just called Apple and they verified that this is the way it works. You cannot go to a date and enter information, you keep getting thrown back to today and then you have to go into the calendar and change it manually on the screen. It is just not efficient.
APC, CyberPower are reliable.
Look for 1500VA. As example:
APC
http://www.amazon.co.uk/APC-Back-UPS-Pro-1500-Connector/dp/B0041MP81Y/
Cyperpower:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dell-CyberPower-Intelligent-LCD-1500VA/dp/B005DL5L50/ -
A Very New and Cool Suggestion for a *PLAIN TASKBAR*
Hello,
I have a very different kind of suggestion for the TASK BAR.
I was listening to songs when a video song came, the video was playing in the background..
i didn't realize that , when i saw the task bar, i liked the way how the transparent task bar became all alive..
The video in the background of the task bar made it do that, I have a suggestion if u can add a visualizer/Equalizer(in plain terms) in the task bar that whenever we play music it comes alive. That would be something very awesome..
Just try to imagine a visualizer in task bar, Give it a chance. :)
Thanks.Hi,
Thanks for your great idea on the UI design of Windows.
If you can post back the image about what you mentioned, it will be more helpful for us to know the details.
Kate Li
TechNet Community Support -
How can we suggest a new DBA OCE certification for very large databases?
How can we suggest a new DBA OCE certification for very large databases?
What web site, or what phone number can we call to suggest creating a VLDB OCE certification.
The largest databases that I have ever worked with barely over 1 Trillion Bytes.
Some people told me that the results of being a DBA totally change when you have a VERY LARGE DATABASE.
I could guess that maybe some of the following topics of how to configure might be on it,
* Partitioning
* parallel
* bigger block size - DSS vs OLTP
* etc
Where could I send in a recommendation?
Thanks RogerI wish there were some details about the OCE data warehousing.
Look at the topics for 1Z0-515. Assume that the 'lightweight' topics will go (like Best Practices) and that there will be more technical topics added.
Oracle Database 11g Data Warehousing Essentials | Oracle Certification Exam
Overview of Data Warehousing
Describe the benefits of a data warehouse
Describe the technical characteristics of a data warehouse
Describe the Oracle Database structures used primarily by a data warehouse
Explain the use of materialized views
Implement Database Resource Manager to control resource usage
Identify and explain the benefits provided by standard Oracle Database 11g enhancements for a data warehouse
Parallelism
Explain how the Oracle optimizer determines the degree of parallelism
Configure parallelism
Explain how parallelism and partitioning work together
Partitioning
Describe types of partitioning
Describe the benefits of partitioning
Implement partition-wise joins
Result Cache
Describe how the SQL Result Cache operates
Identify the scenarios which benefit the most from Result Set Caching
OLAP
Explain how Oracle OLAP delivers high performance
Describe how applications can access data stored in Oracle OLAP cubes
Advanced Compression
Explain the benefits provided by Advanced Compression
Explain how Advanced Compression operates
Describe how Advanced Compression interacts with other Oracle options and utilities
Data integration
Explain Oracle's overall approach to data integration
Describe the benefits provided by ODI
Differentiate the components of ODI
Create integration data flows with ODI
Ensure data quality with OWB
Explain the concept and use of real-time data integration
Describe the architecture of Oracle's data integration solutions
Data mining and analysis
Describe the components of Oracle's Data Mining option
Describe the analytical functions provided by Oracle Data Mining
Identify use cases that can benefit from Oracle Data Mining
Identify which Oracle products use Oracle Data Mining
Sizing
Properly size all resources to be used in a data warehouse configuration
Exadata
Describe the architecture of the Sun Oracle Database Machine
Describe configuration options for an Exadata Storage Server
Explain the advantages provided by the Exadata Storage Server
Best practices for performance
Employ best practices to load incremental data into a data warehouse
Employ best practices for using Oracle features to implement high performance data warehouses -
My Mac book Pro is running very slow and the rainbow ball is appearing all the time. Any suggestions for clean up?? I have the OS X Lion system.
As well as what a brody asked :
- do you need more RAM? (run Activity Monitor and see how much free RAM - green - is available)
- do you Restart fairly regularly, e.g. at least once a week, to clear out any swap or temporary files?
- do you need to do maintenance, e.g. clearing out caches and unused logs, etc? -
The power button on the top of my iPhone 5 is very difficult to turn on and requires an inordinate amount of pressure. Any suggestions for a solution?
Check this website to see if your device is eligible for this program: https://www.apple.com/ca/support/iphone5-sleepwakebutton/
-
Good Day.
I'm running PP CS6 on a mostly home-built PC under Win 7 Pro, v.6.1.7601, Serv Pack 1, build 7601.
System is a64 bit Intel Core i7 970 @ 3.GHz, 3201Mhz, 6 Cores, 12 Logic
24GB RAM
NVIDIA Quadro 4000 w/2GB, Driver is 9.18.13.697
Internal HDD is a 10KRPM Velocerapter (as I recall)
External drives are a 4TB Glyph ForteRaid via eSata.
My media is footage direct from my Canon 5DM3 - no transcoding.
My problem is my PP timeline is VERY sluggish (compared to what I'm used to in Sony Vegas Pro and FCP 7). It can take a half to a full second for an action to happen. For example, if I click on the edge of a clip to trim it, it can take that long to register the click, and then again that long to move with my mouse. Similarly, if I click on the timeline to reposition the CTI (yes, I'm a bit OldSchool), it can take a full second to catch up with me. Same with playback. Once it starts playing, I get great fps, but it's just getting there that's the issue.
I have NOT yet tried transcoading the footage to Cineform or similar, but from EVERYTHING I've read, this kind of footage should be zero problem for CS6.
If you would be so kind as to guide me as to what I might look at to make my system a bit more snappy.
Also, I live in Southern California. Are there any reputable Adobe Gurus out here that I can take my system to (as mentioned, it's homebuilt) where they can "tune me up" and see that I'm running everything in the most efficient manor? I have some good projects upcoming (90 min HowTo videos, etc) that I would very much like to be running at peaque efficiency with.
Thanks very much for any and all suggestions, thoughts, ideas and guidance!Ok... just for you I rebooted to Win7 to test.
I have a 42 minute Timeline with a few
cuts back and forth between two AVCHD sources.
One is the sample from ExactImage that has been confirmed
as being affected by the (now fixed) AVCHD bug in CS6.
The other is a sample provided by Fuzzy Barsik.
Both clips can be found for download in this thread:
CS6 / AVCHD / Spanned Clip Bug / What Cameras
And Media Types Are Affected?
http://forums.adobe.com/message/5596038#5596038
When I jump back and forth in the Timeline from cut to cut
and immediately hit play, I don't see the lags you describe.
I am running CS6.0.5.
note:
I don't have MPE enabled: -
I have an iMac OSX version 10.5.8 It is running very sluggish. How can I re-speed it up?
Hi,
I'm running an iMac OSX version 10.5.8
It's running slow, sluggish. How can I speed it up (as it was when new)?
Thanks.Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 or higher are Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. Versions 1.5.1 or later are Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts had been significantly reduced in Tiger and Leopard. These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard and should not be installed.
OS X automatically defragments files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc. Other utilities are also available such as Onyx, Leopard Cache Cleaner, CockTail, and Xupport, for example.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
Backuplist
Carbon Copy Cloner
Data Backup
Deja Vu
iBackup
JaBack
Silver Keeper
MimMac
Retrospect
Super Flexible File Synchronizer
SuperDuper!
Synchronize Pro! X
SyncTwoFolders
Synk Pro
Synk Standard
Tri-Backup
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at CNet Downloads or MacUpdate. -
I just had surgery and so have a few weeks to sit at home. I would like to redo all of my albums in iPhoto (about 30,000 pix in three libraries).
Does anyone have any suggestions for a good album naming system? I have used "Thanksgiving 2005" for example in the past but I haven't been consistent. Before I start I thought I would see if any of you have found a surefire system that helps with sorts, etc.
Thanks for your time!
DennyI probably have as many photos as you if not more, but I do not use keywords. Also, since many of my photos are scanned-in snapshots, the dates on many are the date of the scan, not the actual date. It was too daunting a task to redate them all.
My system is purely chronologic. I use iPhotoBuddy to create several separate libraries. My first one contains photos from the 1890's through 1978. It happens to be labeled 1920-1978 because that was the earliest date of my photos until we found the 1800s ones . Each of my libraries contains a maximum of about 6000 photos. I chose that number because the prior versions of iPhoto would get sluggish with more than that, and that size is not too large to work with. I now have 10 libraries; some are just one year, some are 2-3, and some are about 5 years of photos. In the earlier years, without digital cameras, the total number of photos for a year is way less than the current year with many digital photos.
I use albums to keep my photos organized for each year. My main reason for this is that I scanned in the photos at different times. Most of them came from our photo albums......one area of my life that has always been carefully organized. However, I would then run across some photos in picture frames, or other places and had to add them into the proper chronologic position. In the Events, and in the previous Film Rolls, the position of the photos cannot be moved as they can in albums.
I use albums to place each photo in its proper position. When I have finished with the positioning of all the photos for the year, I then number them. (I don't put the exact dates on them; I know they go from Jan to Dec, and from the content it is fairly easy to identify when they were taken. I really don't care if a particular photo was from March 4 or 16....I know it was after Valentine's Day and before Easter!). My numbering system is also very simple. I use 3 or 4 digits depending on how many total photos are in the album. For example, for 1985, my first three photos are: 1985-001, 1985-002, 1985-003. For 2007, my first three photos are 2007-0001, 2007-0002, 2007-0003. Numbering them consecutively keeps them in order when I export them to an external drive as backup or burn them to disks, so I would not have to resort them.
I use my albums when I make my iMovies for each year, so it is crucial for me to have the photos in the correct order chronologically. I make DVDs of each year....some years need 4-6 DVDs for all the activities, photos and videos, but some years are less eventful and I can get all our photos and videos on one DVD.
I do keep my photos in Events, labeled as to what they are, but I use that just for viewing the photos I want to see or show someone. I have a pretty good sense as to which photos are where, so I haven't really needed to make a search for specific photos except one time for a friend's anniversary. When I initially began to scan in my photos, I did put titles on them, but that became tedious and repetitious. I found I wanted to use the same titles for different photos of the same people or places. Keywords were not a part of iPhoto then. Now, my scanner just numbers the photos, so I have numbers on those and the digital ones. I do add descriptions to many of my photos, but I should add keywords as well. I may get to that after I finish my iMovie/DVD projects. I have about 10 more family movies to do first!
Whatever system you chose, it has to be one that works for you. My dad (on a PC)keeps his photos on two different drives and put them into folders by person. He is sorry now that he did it that way because he can't find anything. I helped him resort his more recent photos by date, since he now thinks that might be a better way of organizing. I tried to get him to consider how he thinks of the photos, and his response was that he liked the combination of people and years, so that is what he is using. I wouldn't like it, but it is working for him. -
Lightroom 3.3 export performance very sluggish - help?
Hello,
Last night I installed the 3.3 update and I started editing a day's worth of photos. Everything seemed fine until I went to export the photos. I only had 140 photos, exported as jpg, 800x600, 72 dpi, so they were pretty small. Normally it would take upt to 5 minutes to do this, but last night after about an hour it was only 36% done. On top of that my entire system slowed down and froze up, and I had to reboot. Exporting the remaining photos took another hour, so rebooting didn't fix the problem.
If there isn't a fix released soon, I'll have to downgrade back to 3.2, though I'm not sure how to do that. My business is suffering because of this.
I'm operating a fast processor on a PC with 4 gigs of RAM so I should be fine. The performance was excellent until the recent upgrade, and I haven't installed anything else recently.
Help!function(){return A.apply(null,[this].concat($A(arguments)))}
FWIW, though it is not reflected in the release notes, a fix for this bug was included in 3.4 RC -- I cannot be sure that all forms of slowness which result in a large scratch file are fixed, but the one I had cornered is very dead in the 3.4 RC build (some were seeing more severe scratch file bloat than I witnessed, though in at least one case the slowdown was comparable). The fix was one that could definitely broad impact.
I don't know if anybody is still watching this thread, but if you were previously seeing this issue, definitely give 3.4 a spin and post your updates.
Dan,
I've been running 3.4RC since the day it was released. At first I was experiencing some general sluggishness overall but things improved dramatically when I increased my Camera Raw Cache settings as suggested in the general "why is Lightroom 3 so slow" thread. Overall, the general performance was back to 2.4 day and I was feeling pretty good. Then last night I had to do an export of 76 .jpg files and my system came to a total crawl. Then, after the very long export (sorry I didn't time it) working within LR was very sluggish with constant spinning and "Loading" dialogs as I moved around. In reflection, I recall having this same problem a few weeks ago when I did a SmugMug export. Sorry I don't have more details other than "this issue has not been resolved in 3.4RC.
Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit
Intel Core Duo 2.50 GHz
4 GB Ram
Please let me know how I can be of further help.
Bill -
Any suggestions for maintenance on my 2008 MBP?
So I bought my 2.4Ghz MBP last October. It works pretty good, and I run all media software programs (Photoshop, Illustrator, Logic, Ableton Live) But after time it seems like my maching is running sluggish. I get the rainbow windmill a lot now (mainly when I'm on the internet) and it just seems to drag more....
Can anyone lend me some SOLID methods of maintenance??? I'm not familiar with any kind of maintenance on Macs.... Your help would be appreciated Thanks!Kappy's Personal Suggestions for OS X Maintenance
For disk repairs use Disk Utility. For situations DU cannot handle the best third-party utilities are: Disk Warrior; DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible. TechTool Pro provides additional repair options including file repair and recovery, system diagnostics, and disk defragmentation. TechTool Pro 4.5.1 or higher are Intel Mac compatible; Drive Genius is similar to TechTool Pro in terms of the various repair services provided. Versions 1.5.1 or later are Intel Mac compatible.
OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep. Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts had been significantly reduced in Tiger and Leopard.
OS X automatically defrags files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive. As for virus protection there are few if any such animals affecting OS X. You can protect the computer easily using the freeware Open Source virus protection software ClamXAV. Personally I would avoid most commercial anti-virus software because of their potential for causing problems.
I would also recommend downloading the shareware utility TinkerTool System that you can use for periodic maintenance such as removing old logfiles and archives, clearing caches, etc.
For emergency repairs install the freeware utility Applejack. If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the commandline. Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard.
When you install any new system software or updates be sure to repair the hard drive and permissions beforehand. I also recommend booting into safe mode before doing system software updates.
Get an external Firewire drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):
1. Retrospect Desktop (Commercial - not yet universal binary)
2. Synchronize! Pro X (Commercial)
3. Synk (Backup, Standard, or Pro)
4. Deja Vu (Shareware)
5. Carbon Copy Cloner (Donationware)
6. SuperDuper! (Commercial)
7. Intego Personal Backup (Commercial)
8. Data Backup (Commercial)
9. SilverKeeper 2.0 (Freeware)
10. MimMac (Commercial)
11. CloneTool Hatchery (Shareware)
12. Clone X (Commercial)
The following utilities can also be used for backup, but cannot create bootable clones:
1. Backup (requires a .Mac account with Apple both to get the software and to use it.)
2. Toast
3. Impression
4. arRSync
Apple's Backup is a full backup tool capable of also backing up across multiple media such as CD/DVD. However, it cannot create bootable backups. It is primarily an "archiving" utility as are the other two.
Impression and Toast are disk image based backups, only. Particularly useful if you need to backup to CD/DVD across multiple media.
Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQs on maintenance, optimization, virus protection, and backup and restore.
Additional suggestions will be found in Mac Maintenance Quick Assist.
Referenced software can be found at www.versiontracker.com and www.macupdate.com. -
Firefox becomes very sluggish after several hours of usage
In the past 2 weeks, after several hours of use, firefox becomes very sluggish. Cannot switch tabs easily. Cannot type emails easily, etc. If reboot computer, works fine at first, but again, after several hours, becomes sluggish again. This happens to both my computers which are on a network. A technician suggested a virus, but have not seen any virus messages. Use AVG 2013 virus software.
A possible cause is security software (firewall,anti-virus) that blocks or restricts Firefox or the plugin-container process without informing you, possibly after detecting changes (update) to the Firefox program.
Remove all rules for Firefox and the plugin-container from the permissions list in the firewall and let your firewall ask again for permission to get full unrestricted access to internet for Firefox and the plugin-container process and the updater process.
See:
*https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Server+not+found
*https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Firewalls
Try to boot the computer in Windows Safe mode with network support (press F8 on the boot screen) as a test to see if that helps.
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