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From: gillies@m.cs.uiuc.edu (Don Gillies)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware
Subject: Re: price of accelerators (Was Re: system 7, first impressions)
Message-ID: <1991May28.202601.16444@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 28 May 91 20:26:01 GMT
References: <5133@dirac.physics.purdue.edu> <3638@hsi86.hsi.com> <1991May25.013620.26769@m.cs.uiuc.edu>
Organization: University of Illinois, Dept. of Comp. Sci., Urbana, IL
Lines: 43


Ok, here's where system 7.0 seems slow to me:

(1) Boot from a 6.x floppy, then reboot 7.0.  System 7.0 insists on
    rebuilding the desktop.  It draws the window frame, then waits a
    generous 15-20 seconds, and then puts up the message:
	"Rebuilding Desktop"
    with a line chart and cancel button, then proceeds to rebuild the
    desktop.  By the way, "cancel" is a farce, because system 7.0 will
    attempt to rebuild the desktop over and over and over and over
    until you finally let if finish without hitting "cancel", in
    subsequent boots.

(2) After quitting an application, my machine often experiences
    a 5-10 second pause before the multifinder windows are drawn.  
    During the pause the hard disk is spinning like crazy, even if
    the exitting program had no useful data to write to the disk.  In
    system 6.x, Every application closed in 1-2 seconds.  This is half
    an order of magnitude of slow-down.

(3) At boot time, the menu bar is drawn, the finder is launched,
    my superclock INIT starts, and then there is a long pause and
    finally multifinder starts up, bumping the clock leftwards by
    2 icons.  The long pause can take 4-8 seconds.

(4) Particularly irritating is that the finder loses keys when you
    quit an application.  I can no longer type apple-q, apple-q to
    quit my application and turn off the machine, because the new
    finder drops the second keypress (apple-q is the key-equivalent
    to shutdown on my machine).  I type apple-q, wait, wait, wait,
    apple-q.

My system is:
-------------
Mac II
apple pmmu
CMS-80 Q280 5" 80 megabyte disk drive
  (identical to apple HD80, 28ms access time)
5Mb DRAM
Apple 8-bit color video card
Keyboard, mouse

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