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Sluggish Mac
MY G5
iMac is slow as a dog these days. I have a gigabyte
of memory on it, and about 2 GB of space left on its
250-GB hard drive.
A gig of
memory should be enough for that computer. It’s the hard
drive that’s the problem: It’s not giving the computer
enough room to manage its memory.
On any
new Mac or PC, the operating system will constantly
shuffle data from RAM—its random-access memory chips—to
its hard drive. This lets it save the faster RAM for
files and programs in use now, while less-essential data
are “paged” out to the hard drive.
But this
efficient mechanism can break down if the drive doesn’t
have enough free space, say, 10 percent of its total
capacity, for all of this reading and writing. The “disk
fragmentation” caused when your files must be saved in
separate, scattered chunks to fit on the drive will slow
the PC further.
Putting
in a larger hard drive or deleting enough files from the
current drive should solve that.
I’VE got
a stack of blank VHS tapes. Can’t I recycle these
things?
Not too
many years ago, you could have made money doing that,
but the market has dried up. Carpel Video in Frederick,
for example, once paid for used VHS tapes, then would
only take them for free—and stopped accepting them
entirely last year. The Seattle recycling company
GreenDisk (http://www.greendisk.com) charges you
up-front to process old videotapes into their component
plastics.
You
might be able to sell them directly to other VCR owners,
to judge from the occasional bargain-basement sale
concluded on
eBay. Charities may be able to use blank videotapes,
as well—but call to check first. |
