Speed Demon (Brendan A.) Mac OS

While we are on the subject, and not a few own old laptops running Windows it seems, I would like to re-iterate how important it is to upgrade an old mechanical hard drive to a SSD (Solid State Drive) to make Windows 10 run smoothly and adequately speedwise, even if only SATA I is supported by the hardware. For an old two core CPU laptop with at least 4gb of RAM, it can effectively increase the speed of the computer by 4X, making Windows 10 quite runnable. The frequent culprits in maxing out computers are the browsers which hog RAM memory because they cache all the web pages and their images that you visit into RAM. For humble computers, do not open many tabs on the browser, only a small handful at most. If you run Windows Task Manager, watch the memory usage for the running apps and you will see what I mean. Once your available free RAM starts running low, Windows starts storing the active data in the hard drive. Even though your hard drive is SSD, there is an overhead penalty to pay as Windows has to process the excess RAM data into hard drive storage using the CPU, slowing down the computer considerably. Increasing RAM capacity, then, is also very important because so many apps today are memory hogs, but older laptops are usually limited on this, often at 4gb.
If you upgrade to SSD on a computer with a Linux OS, you will create a computer speed demon, but still be mindful of the browser issue if you have limited RAM.
There is a lot of free Windows software on the Internet to clone an old hard drive onto a SSD. I found EaseUS Partition Master very good especially if your SSD is of slightly less capacity than the original old drive (and of course if there is room for your old data).

MacOS X running on Windows XP running on MacOS X

Well, I rose to the challenge and successfully managed to boot Mac OS X on Windows XP running on Mac OS X.

At first, my efforts to install Mac OS X 10.3 Panther met with little success.


  • Compared to most computers these days, it's no speed demon, but for running Mac OS X - and VirtualBox - it does the job well. After downloading and installing, VirtualBox, you set up a virtual.
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  • OS reinstallation may sound a bit complicated, but with DAEMON Tools everything becomes handier. Create a bootable USB drive for Windows, Mac OS or Linux in a few clicks, and get a fast and reusable tool for operating system recovery. Speed up your Mac.

If at first you don't succeed...

This older iMac hasn’t been a speed demon for a while, but it’s responsive enough that it doesn’t fall into the “annoying” category. Mavericks doesn’t seem to have made it noticeably.

I finally managed it. Here are some screenshots:


SpeedDemon

Basically, I booted my PowerBook G4 Aluminum 1.25Ghz with Mac OS X 10.3 'Panther', and booted the commercial x86 emulator Virtual PC, on which I had installed Windows XP. In Windows I activated the PearPC emulator and successfully booted from a Mac OS X 10.2 'Jaguar' boot CD.

How did it run? Unbearably, terrifyingly slow would be an understatement. Mac OS X is no speed demon on older Macs, never mind when being emulated on an emulated processor (a 'cat /proc/cpu' in Linux shows my powerbook emulating a 250Mhz Pentium II, while the emulated Mac OS X mysteriously reports itself as 0 Mhz) The boot process from the CD took about 2 hours.

At first I actually tried to boot from the Panther install CDs in order to install Mac OS X 10.3 on a dummy hard drive image, but after 8 hours of waiting for the installer to actually start....well....installling, I decided to create a bootable compact disk using BootCD. Unfortunately BootCD only supports MacOS X 10.2, hence no Panther on PearPC.

Speed Demon (brendan A.) Mac Os X

Regardless, I think it's pretty neat. Now all I need to do is fire up VPC with Windows in the emulated Mac in the emulated PC on the real Mac :D.

Speed Demon (brendan A.) Mac Os 11