Ever since I bought my MacBook, Mac OS X has been my first choice, especially for the supreme font rendering, elegant form factor and UI, and the Command button.
However, I miss the responsiveness of my Linux machine, which was just a 550 MHz Dell PC with 576MB RAM. These specifications really pale in comparison to those of my MacBook, which has a 2GHz dual-core processor and 2GB RAM.
So, here are two tweaks I use and would recommend to make Mac OS X Tiger more responsive:
Step 1: Disable the Dashboard
Step 2: Disable Spotlight
And you’re done.
These two consume a lot of RAM, so disabling them has made my Mac more responsive. By more responsive, I mean no more lag when hovering over the Dock or activating Exposé—something which I commonly experienced before.
Also, I find Google Desktop much faster than Spotlight, although I would lose the convenience of searching for files within dialog boxes. However, Google Desktop does a fine job at replacing Quicksilver (a program launcher), so I have thrown away Quicksilver too. Just a tip: if you want to show the folder containing the Google Desktop result, press Command-Enter. Thanks, Google.
Of course, if you need these two features, you could alternatively get a RAM upgrade. I’m currently deliberating about this too.
