Every time I boot up this mac it takes forever to get going and sometimes the whole thing crashes. Any ideas as to what to do to speed things up?

1. Re-build the desktop (hold down the two keys to the left of the space bar during start up and click yes/OK when message appears. 2. Defragment the hard disk(Norton Utilities-Speed D

You might want to turn off unwanted Extensions. Go to the Apple menu, Control Panels, then Extensions Manager. Go down the list and turn off extensions that you don't need. Be careful, though! You don't want to turn off something you use. If you don't know what an extension is, then leave it on. Turning off unwanted extensions will definitely speed up the boot process.

Its been my exp that defraging a mac hard drive is pretty useless. I am a heavy computer user, daily download and moving/deleting of files (these things cause heavy defraging in most Wintel machine). Yet after a year of this I installed a defrag utilty on my mac and guess what? It wasn't even bad enough to worry about. The hard drive in a Mac isn't like one in a PC, sure they are physically the same but the file system itself works differently. The average user has no need to defrag a mac. Personally I fight nortons utilities to be the pits the days, their disk check is ok to repair certin things that disk first aid will not touch, but I still only would use that unless I was facing the lose of very valuable data. The extentions method above is most likely your best bet. Have fun.

I have an iBook, second generation, (w/ firewire) and I have been playing unreal alot, and every time I played a sertain map, it says "out tof memory" so I emptied te system cache, and reset it to... 128k? and turned on virtual memory, and now it takes for ever to start up/ preform neccisary functions! what woud be a good number i could set it at for, um, semi-optimum preformance?