dont listen to mat he just likes to try to argue because he doenst get out much
seriously search on the forums here and everytime he responds to me its to point out how incorrect i am, which seems to be his only goal to the point of losing the original point of why u had even asked the question u did in the first place
Perhaps you could stop that paranoia somehow. There is no goal from my side, and I am just arguing agains things you write when they are crap, so that new users do not get confused. So if you didn´t collect serious knowledge about cooperative multitasking, please do not state about it. Also it makes no sense to argue against Mac OS 9 or older PPCs permanentely in a Mac OS 9 forum. Be it as banned chrisnova, supernova or geforceg4 or whatever.
Such an absolute nonsense is this statement for example:
like a shell terminal,
There are no shells or terminals for Mac OS 9 like you know them from Unix Operating Systems. If you talk about an Telnet program or similar, FTP at Mac OS 9 was always done graphically as well by end users. I bought "Anarchy" long before it was renamed to "Interarchy", and later often used "Transmit". No text commands used anywhere.
Now back on topic:
part12studios you are right. Early Toast versions locked the complete computer. That was necessary, as the buffers have been small, and another program that took too much CPU time could interrupt the data stream to the burner. That changed with later G4s and new Toast versions. For example the first version of Toast 5 which came out 2001 also was ready for "background burning".
About your initialy question, I would be interrested, if you have this problem with all programs? Your machine is not the fastest one, but there should not be such problems, except some huge programs that are starting up. Ususally smaller programs should open immediatly. A video might be a good idea, so we can tell you if it is "normal".
The idea with the new massstorage is ok. It really might speed up the machine a lot. Especially if you use some SSDs (which are cheap enough now, as DieHard pointed out) to be used in our older Macs as well.
But it might be that you got some simple software issue as well. Are there any background programs running? Some network tasks like crazy AppleTalk rights for the entire disk or similar. Perhaps there are other things slowing down your machine? We will see.
In every case working with the Mac OS´ Finder and getting a "quite fasst" feeling should be possible with your G4. Turning off the virtual memory usually speeds up the computer, as this memory is at the mass storage (in your case a slow HD). So that cannot be the point.
But; opening a huge program really can feel like a beginning freeze. Opening Photoshop 7 for example, takes even at the fastest G4 some seconds, and you cannot really do anything else in this time (except some background tasks that are already running, like decoding some MP3 or similar).
If you do such a video, please open some smaller simple programs like simple Text and move around in the finder as well, so that we can see if it feels like at our machines.