from the desk of stinkpot

i’m still investigating what’s actually going on here, but i’ve noticed that after installing developer tools on my powerbook g4, a hardware preference pane has appeared in my system preferences. interestingly, opening this pane revealed that my L2 cache had been set to none by default. i’m no computer engineer, but it seems logical to me that if my processor has an L2 cache, turning it on (setting that option to “512 kb”) would be a useful action.

and indeed, after rebooting, i perceive things to be moving slightly more quickly. (although, it’s difficult to separate the effects of turning on this cache from the effects of simply rebooting and clearing out swap files, etc.) nevertheless, i’d give this a try if you’ve got a g4 processor and are hoping for some increased speed, without having to spring for a new intel-based mac.

[update] you know what: scratch this one. i’m thinking it doesn’t work; i notice that changing the L2 cache setting to “512KB” doesn’t stick. reopening the hardware pane after making the adjustment always shows “none” for L2 cache.