Help with making SL faster

Hi, my computer is an eMac and I am wondering what I can do to make Second Life run faster on it? Things take a very long time to load and I see mostly grey squares everywhere.
I don't know anything about what it would need, the following is what I got from my About This Mac window:
Mac OS X
Version 10.3.9
1 GHz PowerPC G4
384 MB SDRAM
Can I add more memory to my computer? Would that help? If anyone can help me out I would appreciate it. I've tried to look through other posts, but I don't understand all the computer related words. If more info is needed about my computer to help just let me know.

Ok well the thing to do is to make the most of your video.
This is accomplished by going to atitech.com and downloading the ati displays utility and installing it on your computer.
Then select secondlife.app set it to performance settings not quality settings and then turn on vertical sync.

In edit preferences menu item of sl client turn back your draw distance to 64 meters and use any performance settings set your cache to 1mb etc and so.

Ok on to the reaL TRUTH. your Mac will likely never go faster than 3-4 fps. This is because Linden Labs coded the Mac client as a PORT of the windows client. The 3d vectors and objects are written through your video chip NOT your cpu. The vector engine on your g4 is only used for texture rendering. This is all ass-backwards and i have more than upbraided Linden Labs on this as my Mac Mini gets 3-4 fps and it has a gigabyte of ram.

However I would max out the ram on your eMac anyway as it will improve other areas of your computer's performance.

Without at least a Radeon 9600 video chip (gpu) or better Second Life will run slowly as in the current Mac PORT it is gpu dependent.

My advice is you could get a cheap windows machine as ANYthing in the windows side will run second life at acceptable speeds. I suspect that Linden Labs will either have to rewrite their Mac client or else raise the hardware requirements to reflect the reality of what they actually have for Mac software which is badly done.

That said I fully sympathize with the situation you find yourself in and suggest you email linden Labs and raise hell that their software is so bad. A lot of Mac users have left SL or use it intermittently as it is such bad software.

If you look at How to Be A Happy Mac user on SL (another Forum Post in this Mac section) you will see I have defended our platform of choice against a LOT of people who have all kinds of ego agendas rather than being supportive of our needs.

Phillip Linden has claimed that Linden Labs is looking into why the Mac client runs so badly but that is only lip service at this time. In actuality he surely knows that is because it is a direct PORT.

He should have emphasized YOUR MAC. I've seen 20 fps or better on my Digital Audio G4. And with only 512MB of RAM. You need a Mac that's UPGRADABLE.

If you're hellbent on using that Mac, Max the RAM as stated above. Next boot and run from a firewire drive. Boot clean. Load NOTHING at startup. Never run anything else while in SL.

Forget a CPU upgrade. SL Runs better on my Quicksilver 2002 800MHz than On my Mac Mini at 1.42 GHz.

Oh. You should also expect your eMac to overheat and die. SL will use 100% of your CPU, 100% of your GPU, beat the crap out of your HD, and generally destroy your computer.

All things equal (CPU Speed, Video card, RAM, etc.), Windows XP will kick the crap out of your Mac IN SECOND LIFE. Of course that's all it's good for.

Do you know you'll get a major boost from a Radeon 9800 video card?

The Current Mac SL "client" if you can call it that is gpu dependent.

Curious about the firewire drive thing as an internal hard drive running at 7200 rpm such as what is in the eMac or a Quicksilver tower is the same speed as a firewire drives yes?

Do you know how much a Radeon 9800 COSTS?!? Anyway I talked to a game programming I know and he said that the Havok engine favors Nvidia over ATI. And so far all my Macs perform much better with Nvidia cards. I'll stick with what's proven to me thanks.

As for a drive, a drive is a drive for the most part. What matters is the interface to it. Looking a LowEndMac.com the HD interface for the newer 1GHz eMacs is ATA100 and the older one says Ultra-ATA. If your Firewire drive is ATA133, you'll see a 33% improvement in throughput. If you can find one that uses SATA drives you could see a 50% improvement in transfer. Next time SL bogs down on you check your HD LED if you have one. It'll probably be steady on.

Anyway that's the only other place for improvement. He really needs to replace it.

I'm playing SL on a 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 with 1.5 GB RAM under OS 10.4.6. It has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9700.

I've installed the ATIccelerator II Preference Pane (http://thomas.perrier.name/index.html) and overclocked the GPU 25% and the video memory 28% (490/261). The system is still stable.

I go from about 8 fps to 10-12 fps, depending on what's going on in the frame. This is not a huge amount, but it makes a pretty good subjective difference.

I have my Powerbook on a stand so it has good ventilation all around it. It's worth a try, but be careful not to overdo the overclock. If you get artifacts in your display or crashes, back off on the oc.

Nice OC. My Nvidia FX5500 is still under clocked to FX5200 specs. I need to do that one day.