As I'm writing this, my new, shiny Macbook is sitting on a workbench somewhere, in a queue waiting to be repaired. I, on the other hand, am sitting at my old, battered, trusty ibook, trying to get some actual work done, and wondering how in the world I ever managed to use it up until late last year.
But nothing bad happens without some benefit, and my pain is your gain, since it's inspired me to write an article about it. There are things you can do, and steps you can take to make working with older computers if not exactly speedy, pretty comfortable and doable.
Os x versions
I originally wrote this for Leopard, and it's still pretty heavily slanted that way. Nonetheless, I'm now running Snow Leopard myself, so I've put a section at the end of each suggestion with any changes that Snow Leopard introduced.
What isn't here
I'm not going to cover everything in this article. There are plenty of resources about running OS X efficiently on older machines. These are, mostly, voiceover specific tips, with a couple of others thrown in for good measure
Beware of the Leopard
One of the first suggestions on how to run Leopard on an older machine is, well, don't. If you can possibly manage it, stick with tiger. it takes up less space, is much easier on your graphics hardware and believe me, that makes a difference even if you can't see the screen and generally is much better suited to your hardware.
The problem with this suggestion, for us in particular, is that you sacrifice a lot. The downside of having your screen reader built into your operating system, is that updates to your screen reader are linked to updates in your operating system. There was a lot of improvement to Voiceover that came along with Leopard, and for a lot of people, myself included, they're too good to give up. But if your old box is just a music player, or a file server, or something you don't need the Leopard improvements for, go for it. For the moment, at least, a lot of software still works with Tiger, and you still get major security updates.
Snow Leopard update: With Snow Leopard, a bit of a new twist has been added to this decision. If you're running a power pc machine: E.g. an old Ibook or a g5 or something, you can't even use Snow Leopard, since it'll only work on Intel machines.
On the other hand, if you're running an Intel machine, but a slow one, you need to think about it. From what I can tell, Snow Leopard itself might be better for your machine, since it's smaller and a bit more efficient than Leopard. On the other hand, changes have been made in Voiceover itself that could possibly make it slower, particularly when doing things like viewing web pages.
If at all possible, given the pretty low upgrade price, buy it and try it. You can always go back if it's impossible. If anyone has any opinions on this, feel free to post them in the comments.
Put Alex into semi-retirement
One of the first things you would have noticed when you got Leopard was the new default voice, Alex. In my opinion, at least, it's really nice, and puts the Mac up there with some of the better offerings. Particularly if you can't afford to buy extra voices, and there are some, the introduction of Alex into OS X is a great thing.
Unfortunately, Alex is the equivalent of a 1000 pound gorilla on your system. Running it as the voice for voiceover uses a lot of processing power, a lot of memory and, from what I can see, a lot of hard drive activity.
That last one is important. Older machines means older and slower hard drives. Anything that goes there is going to slow down your system a lot, particularly when you're trying to run *other* things that are trying to use your hard drive.
What this means for you is, Leopard will feel sluggish and unresponsive. The word, "busy" will be said a lot. Just using voiceover itself to read through web pages or finder folders or mail folders will feel slow. You might even get distorted or choppy speech, particularly when the machine is under load.
My best advice? Don't use Alex for voiceover. Switch to Fred or Ralph or Victoria or any of the other older voices that still existed in Tiger. It won't suddenly turn your computer into a Macbook pro, but it will make it feel a lot more responsive.
Why "semi" retirement?
After reading my previous point, you're probably asking yourself why I said semi-retirement. I've just told you to stop using it. Well, no, not quite. The trick is that, for a Voiceover user at least, OS X has two system voices. There's the one you're using for everyday work, and there's the so called "system voice" which is configured in the "speech" section of system preferences.
If you configure this correctly, you can have almost the best of both worlds. You can have the efficiency of one of the older voices while you're working, and Alex when you want to read a novel or a long article or web page.
Go into the speech tab in system preferences, change the system voice to Alex, and set the speed so it's comfortable. You then have a couple of choices. The first is to check the check box in that section that says "speak selected text when a key is pressed". You can then select the "set key" button and enter a key combination.
The other option is to create a system hotkey for the menu item that says "start speaking text" in the services menu.
The reason I offer two ways to do this is that, occasionally, the first method doesn't work as well, or at least this was the case a few versions of Leopard ago. Try the easy way first, and if it's unreliable, try the second.
So how do you use it? Simply select the text you want to read and press your hot key. Alex will start reading to you. To stop it, just about any command that causes Voiceover to speak will work. If it doesn't, and you somehow end up with voiceover and alex both speaking together, simply select a small amount of text and hit the hotkey. The previous reading will stop, your new selection will read and, being short, Alex will stop speaking fairly quickly. of course, you can also create a hotkey for "stop speaking" in the services menu, but I've usually found this to be unnecessary. As always, your milage may vary.
A final hint. If your shortcut stops working, or you hear "start speaking text" and nothing is spoken, try quitting the speech service from activity monitor, which I'll talk about near the end of this article. It'll automatically restart once you press the hotkey.
Snow Leopard Update: In snow leopard, if you enable the function in the speech tab, whatever key you use now appears to work as a toggle. Simply press it a second time to make it stop.
Stop tracking
Another simple thing you can do is, turn off cursor tracking. I'm serious, this will help, and make Voiceover a lot less jumpy and less prone to going out of focus. Don't touch your preference settings, however. Simply hit the hotkey vo-shift-f3 and VO will say "cursor tracking off"
Unfortunately, you'll have to do this every time Voiceover starts, since it doesn't appear to be sticky. What it *does* mean, though, is that when you really *do* need cursor tracking, you can simply enable it again, do what you need to do, and disable it. Also, when you do this, make sure you know the hotkeys in voiceover to move cursors around manually. With those, you can easily move your mouse or keyboard or voiceover to where you want them, when you want them.
Snow Leopard update: In Snow Leopard, this appears not to be true anymore. As far as I can tell, cursor tracking now seems to remember its setting between restarts, making this a bit less annoying.
Throw away the script
No, I don't mean you should suddenly take an improvisational drama class. I mean that, whenever possible, turn off javascript in Safari. Javascript seems to be very hard on your computer. All that scrolling, updating different parts of web pages etc will slow down your web browsing experience quite a lot.
It's possible to do this from the security preference section, but if you're doing it a lot, there's an easier way.
Go to the "advanced" preference section in safari, and check the box that says "show develop menu in menu bar" You will then have a "develop" menu near the end of your Safari menu bar, which includes the disable javascript option.
To make this even easier, you can then go and create a system hotkey that will let you turn this on and off without ever needing to go into the menu.
When should you use this? In my opinion, whenever possible. Try to leave it turned off unless you're viewing a web page that needs it. Then turn it on and refresh your page. Do what you have to, and turn it off again.
The only slightly confusing part about using this from a hotkey is that it will always say "disable javascript" whether you're enabling or disabling it. If you look at the menu you'll see that the state is indicated with a checkbox that's either checked or unchecked next to the option. If you're ever unsure, just quickly jump up to the menu manually and look.
Snow Leopard update: This now no longer seems to be true. Unless you've done something pretty strange to your verbosity settings, the menu now tells you whether it's checked or unchecked when you press the key making this a bit less confusing.
Activity monitor is your friend
And finally, a quick word about activity monitor. You can find it in the utilities folder under your applications folder. From here, you can get information about memory, disk space, network activity and more. When you're trying to work out what programs are using a lot of resources, this is the place to go.
i don't have time or space to explain everything about activity monitor here, but a quick look through the "processes" table will give you a lot of information. I'm mentioning it here because the first time you do this, you might be a bit alarmed. If you look at "Screenreaderd", which is the name OS X gives to Voiceover, it will say "not responding"
What this *usually* means is exactly what it says, OS X can't get any response from an application. If you go to it, it will probably have frozen, and the only way to quit it is a force quit from Activity monitor.
However, this is not what it means for Voiceover. I have no idea why, but OS X *always* seems to think that Voiceover is not responding. I haven't run across any other application that does this, but in the case of Voiceover, it's safe to ignore it.
Snow Leopard update: This no longer happens in Snow Leopard, thankfully. Also, it now seems to be called voiceover, not screenreaderd
Wrapping it up
So those are my suggestions for getting productive work done on a slower machine as painlessly as possible. Hopefully, with these and the other links in this article, you can get the most out of your OS X machine for as long as possible.
If you have any other suggestions, let everyone know about them in the comments.
