Defrag a Mac?

[didgematt]

Is there a way i can increase the performance of my G4 iMac?
I cannot increase the RAM any more, and the 60g HD is only 10g full (as i bought an external firewire drive for storage). I have removed many non-important programs, however the performance is painfully slow, for example text does not appear for 1-2 secs after typing, and internet pages take too long to load, even though i have a fast broadband connection.
Is there a way to clean-up the Mac, like defreag for PC? I'm using OSX, Panther. Thanks, Matt :)

[glc]

Here's quite a discussion on this topic:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Macintosh/Q_20426892.html

[didgematt]

Thanks for the URL, i need to subscribe to see it, so i'll look into that. in the meantime, anyone else had the same problem as me, or have a solution? Thanks people.

[glc]

No, just scroll down past the ads, you can read the whole thread without subscribing.

[ricercar]

How much RAM do you have? Do you need Panther or can you use 10.2.x?

I had 1G RAM on my G4 550 powerbook, and even so I never upgraded to 10.3 becuase it seemed slower than was tolerable. Luckily 10.2.8 was all I ever needed for my recording studio hardware and software.

[Jester]

you shouldn't ever have to defrag a Mac that is what is so beautiful about its HDD architecture. It sounds like a a file might be corrupt or missing after al the uninstalls. Try to restore panther with the restore disk. This should be easy and painless with the use of the external drive. Also make sure all the programs are installed on the macs actuall hard drive and all the other stuff on the external. I don't know if you are doing this but i find programs installed on an external drive run rather slow. hope this helps. I know Kov-ice and some other guys are mac addicts around here. look in the alternative computing area. i know they talk alot about macs, linux, unix ect there.