$HOME, Library, Preferences etc

I was recently talking with a friend who is thinking of replacing his beloved but aging eMac 700 with something modern, and was trying to help him work out what the smart buy for his usage would be. His current complaint was that he gets the spinning beachball in Safari an awful lot and the entire system seemed sluggish when he had several browser windows open. I got him to run Activity Monitor to examine whether Safari’s cache problems were contributing to the slowness. One of the things he mentioned that startled me was that iTunes on his machine was taking a steady 25% of the CPU time. I was surprised because on my daily machine, I’ve never seen its usage vary much from around 10-11%. Then I compared my machine’s CPU (a 1.67 GHz G4) with his (a 700 MHz G4) and realized that the amount of work being done by both machines was similar, and because his CPU was about half as fast as mine, it was having to do twice as much work as mine in the same time to play back the MP3 file. iTunes ...