Unsanity ShadowKiller
Since I got my iBook G3 I have been searching for ways to increase it’s performance. Last night I was doing a search and started reading through an article that I saw a while back that I didn’t read before because it was quite long. In the article I saw a link to an application that would disable the shadows around window borders and speed up your system. The application’s website said that it would significantly improve performance on older G3 Macs.
I downloaded, installed and ran the application. I was immediately blown away. The application disabled the shadows and my system was much more responsive. The mouse felt much more responsive and windows opened and closed much faster. I opened up iTunes and could even use cover art. I’m not sure if this is because of the latest iTunes update or because of ShadowKiller. I do know that before I upgraded to the latest release of iTunes that I could not use the cover art browser.
When I first ran this application I was very pleased with the added performance that I gained from disabling the shadows. I had to reboot my system last night and when I logged back in the shadows were back so I had to disable them again. I can simply add the application to startup items to solve that problem. After I had rebooted and disabled the shadows I was not as blown away with the speed increase. I’m not sure why this is and would welcome feedback on that. Maybe my system was just needing to be rebooted. I’ll continue to use the application because it does speed up the system somewhat, just not as much as it did when I first killed the shadows.
It takes a little bit of getting use to not having the shadows. As I was typing this entry I had the window in front of another window with a white background and could not tell that the window I was typing in was shorter than the other window (I hope that made sense).
Tags: free software, g3 imac, mac customization, mac freeware, mac os x speed up, mac tweaks, os x customization, shadowkiller, speed up mac, unsanity, unsanity shadow killer
March 11th, 2007 at 6:13 pm
Unsanity has some hella kewl schitt. I’m using WindowShade, ClearDock, and Cee Pee You (all from them), and I love them. I’ve never tried Shadow Killer, ‘cuz I kinda like the shadows I guess. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl on my old G3 iMac though — anything would help that poor ol’ thang out.
Hey, when you installed Tiger, did you tell it not to install all the extra language packs? If you didn’t (like I stupidly didn’t), you might wanna try Monolingual out, if you haven’t already. It probably won’t speed up the system any, but it’ll free up a few hundred megabytes of disk space by letting you remove all the extra languages you don’t use..
Also, if you open up Terminal and run the daily, weekly, and monthly cron jobs that OS X is supposed to run — if you leave your Mac running night and day — it might help a little, too. I do it every once in awhile on my PowerBooks, it seems to help. I’ll copy and paste the instructions:
For OS X 10.2 or later:
1. Open Terminal (under Applications – Utilities)
2. If you wish to run only a daily script, type sudo periodic daily
If you wish to run only a weekly script, type sudo periodic weekly (note that the weekly script will likely take the longest amount of time to run)
If you wish to run only a monthly script, type sudo periodic monthly
If you wish to run all three scripts, type sudo periodic daily weekly monthly
3. Press Return
4. Enter your Admin password when prompted and press Return
5. When all processes have finished (and the terminal prompt is displayed) type exit to logout of Terminal
6. Click on Terminal - Quit Terminal to close Terminal
Aren’t I just a wealth of information?
March 11th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
I haven’t tried out there other apps yet but I’ll have to give them a whirl and see what they are all about. I really do prefer the shadows as well but if it’s going to give me an added boost by disabling them, they’re staying disabled, lol.
There is a program called SystemOptimizer X that gives you a GUI to do those things. It’s $12, not bad for an application to cleanup your system. I leave the Mac running overnight so the cron jobs should take care of system maintenance for me.
March 11th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
By the way, if anyone gets an error message about my MySQL database when they try to post a comment, please let me know.
March 11th, 2007 at 6:38 pm
OH and I forgot to mention that I didn’t install the extra printer drivers or the extra languages when I installed OS X Tiger.