Playing around with my "new " G4 Cube (450 mhz,20 gig hd,1.5 gig ram mem.) and before doing a back up on an external drive. I hook it up via Firewire and it doesn't see it. No problem via USB though. Not sure why. Anyhow,since the Cube has Leopard installed I have access to Time Machine,so I  was planning on using that for  backing up but it was so slow that i gave up and canceled. Now I'm trying to repair permissions and again it's taking forever. I can go away, have breakfast,come back and it's still "repairing". Is this typical for older Macs. On my 3.5 year old Imac it takes a few minutes at the most.

OK,switched to a different cable and port and now I can see my Ext hard drive. Some progress at least.
As for permission repairs, the Cube froze at a certain point and I had to do a re-boot...

More Progress.
Finally got Permissions repaired but gave up on Time Machine and used Super Duper to copy my Cube hard drive to an external one. TM was very slow. Did some research on Google and found i should delete the In Progress file. Since the back up progress had been interrupted once or twice, I had a large size file to get rid off. THAT took a long time to delete. Tried again to use TM for back up but it told me my External HD was too small at 13 gig byte that I needed 81 gigs..? My entire G4 drive is only 40 Gig so am not sure what was going on there..
Anyhow,now I've installed 10.3 on my G4 but Safari or FireFox won't run, Safari just keeps bouncing and FF opens and closes right away. Feels like I'm back battling MS Windows somedays..

You cube's hard drive probably has bad sectors. Time to replace it. Afterall it's at least 8 years old now and only 5400rpm. It would account for the permissions repair not working, the slowness, and applications not working....

Ed

Get a new hard drive - that's good advice! Also, TM can take a LONG time the first time you run it - twenty-four hours is not unheard of - Apple does say to just let it do its thang until it's finished - it WILL finish. Apple also says your backup drive must be as large, or preferably, twice as large as the disk you're backing up. The larger the TM drive - the furthr back you'll be able to go back in time. TM will delete oldest files first WHEN your TM drive is FULL, and not until then, so the more space the merrier....

I still use a G4-500 everyday as my main admin machine, and it's not as fast as my shiny new iMac, but it's not un-useable by any measure; well, Safari takes three bounces in the Dock to launch on the G4, while on my iMac, Safari seems to open before I finish clicking, but like the guy on the Rogers commercial - the only thing much faster is the spinning wheel while I wait for pages to load. The oldest machine still in use here is a G3-300, and it seems slow now, but still useable for mundane tasks - email, accounting, word processing, even Adobe Illustrator CS, but not PhotoShop. The G3 is maxed at 10.3, the G4 at 10.4, and thats the end of the road for those guys. I have to say that each iteration of OS X has run faster than the previous versions on these machines, unlike Windows, so do update as far as you can with any Mac.

Happy Mac'ing!

Dan

Thanks
So now I'm running 10.3 on this G4 but it was doing pretty good with 10.5 actually. The reason I downgraded is that the monitor screen goes "batty" at times, that is, it just goes blank. All I get is vertical rows of dasheds and a small square where my mouse pointer is,which I can move around. Everything is still running in the background. I found the best way to get my desktop back is to put the computer to sleep and wake it up. This happens continuously for the first 5 minutes or so of turning on the computer then it's not too bad after that. I thought maybe 10.5 was too much for it so,after upgrading the memory to 1.5 gig, I intalled 10.3 but it still does the "disapearing desktop" trick. Maybe the video card isn't powerful enough for OS X? Otherwise I'll re-install 10.5 because as it is many of my programs can't open,(Safari,FireFox, Itunes, although IE does launch and runs good)for some reason,since downgrading to 10.3. I did all the upgrades and permission repairs but no luck.

I would suspect your video card.

It is amazing how critical the video card is, but if you want to see performance improvements on older systems, a faster video card with more video ram and a fast hard drive will give you your best bang for the buck. RAM is your next big hitter, but only if you are swapping out pages frequently.

In the olden times, when I used to play with Intel and Microsoft, I had a 650 MHz PC and a 500 MHz PC. THe 500 MHz PC outperformed the 650 MHz PC, and the reason was because the 650 MHz PC had a 5400 RPM drive and the 500 MHz PC had a 10K RPM drive.

The key is to look for bottlenecks.

Neat stuff.
Thanks