Upgrade RAM or hardrive to speed up Mac?

[thriftymac]

Our G4 Powerbook 1Ghz (firewire 800) with 1GB of RAM (2 512MB chips) can be a bit slow. We get the spinning beach ball when switching applications. My wife and I use it with two user accounts that we switch back and forth from.

The hard drive is quite full (10 gb of free space). Here's my question - Would it make more sense to upgrade the hard drive or the ram? Space isn't an issue since I can take off some files. The current drive is the original 4200rpm. The apps we normally run are mail, quicken, firefox, iphoto. Sometimes I run photoshop but not too often.

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

[clyde2801]

Our G4 Powerbook 1Ghz (firewire 800) with 1GB of RAM (2 512MB chips) can be a bit slow. We get the spinning beach ball when switching applications. My wife and I use it with two user accounts that we switch back and forth from.

The hard drive is quite full (10 gb of free space). Here's my question - Would it make more sense to upgrade the hard drive or the ram? Space isn't an issue since I can take off some files. The current drive is the original 4200rpm. The apps we normally run are mail, quicken, firefox, iphoto. Sometimes I run photoshop but not too often.

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

What's the most that the pb will take? If it will take 2 gig or more for less than an exiorbitant amount, I'd go that way first.

Another thing to do is get a external fw800 drive and boot from it. Even if it doesn't make much of a difference, you can still use the extra storage on it. Either that, or get a 7200 rpm notebook drive and set your old one up in an external enclosure.

[thriftymac]

Thanks I appreciate it.

It looks like it takes 2GB and it would be about $120.
Do you have a favorite place to get RAM?

I was also thinking about setting up my iMac G5 1.6ghz as a media server for photos and music. So I could free up some space on the book. Have you tried something like this?