Why is my mac mini so slow?

Question

Hello everybody.
I recently bought a mac mini 1.66 Ghz Intel Duo Core with 1gb Ram, OSX 10.4.6.
I installed it with all the softwares that I need for my work and that used to work perfectly well on my 1ghz G4: Adobe CS2, Fontlab, FireFox, Font Explorer. I frequently work with 4-5 simultaneouly running apps (one or two big like indesign and illustrator and 2 or 3 smaller ones like ichat, font explorer and Itunes), but it seems to slow down the computer a lot especially when it comes to switching frome one app to another. My old G4 used to be quite quicker.
Is there anything I can do to fix that or is it normal? Is it going to change with upcoming updates of the OS?

Answer 1

None of Adobe's applications are recompiled for Intel processors, meaning they will run under the Rosetta emulation layer. This will result in significantly slower performance, even compared to an old G4. As of now, there is nothing you can do about this until Adobe releases Univeral Binaries for their software. As for the other applications you use, you need to make sure the versions you have are indeed Universal Binaries. Firefox is now a Universal Binary, but I don't know about Fontlab/Font Explorer. But my guess is that you're running all your software as PowerPC under Rosetta - that's why your computer is so slow.