PowerbookG4 Titanium 550MHz HELP

casey37812 said:

hi i have a powerbook g4 titanium 550mhz processor with a 10gb hard drive.
i only have 512mb of ram. i am running tiger 10.4.11


it runs kinda slow and i cant even watch movies or youtube videos without lag.
all i want is to be able to watch videos and play halo.

i plan on upgrading to 1gb of ram and getting a 160gb harddrive.

i know that you need a 867mhz powerpc g4 processor. but i was wondering if anybody knew if it would run good on my 550mhz processor with 1gb of ram.

i also was wondering if i upgrade my ram and hard drive if my computer will be able to play videos and movies with no lag. and be able to play halo or counter strike with no lag.


PLEASE HELP.

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Well, I can tell you right off, you can forget about the games, that ain't happening. Your machine is just a little too old for them.

But maybe if you maxed out the RAM, you would probably see less lag in playing movies. YouTube, not so much, Flash doesn't play nice with any Mac.

Cassie said:

Well, I can tell you right off, you can forget about the games, that ain't happening. Your machine is just a little too old for them.

But maybe if you maxed out the RAM, you would probably see less lag in playing movies. YouTube, not so much, Flash doesn't play nice with any Mac.

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I've been a Flash developer on a Mac for years and your comment about Flash not playing nice with a Mac is WRONG. Is that comment based on facts, or are you just pulling that out of your?

The issue the OP has with his G4 is simply that there isn't enough processing power or VRAM to play current media files affectively. Period. Adding ram might help up to a certain limit - but retiring the machine would be the best option instead of throwing money down the hole. The machine is ancient for a laptop.

so why is it my G3 ibook clamshell (sig) can play video files okay?
I used to use it to watch episodes of friends all the time, provided it was reading the files from the HDD.

THX1139 said:

I've been a Flash developer on a Mac for years and your comment about Flash not playing nice with a Mac is WRONG. Is that comment based on facts, or are you just pulling that out of your?

The issue the OP has with his G4 is simply that there isn't enough processing power or VRAM to play current media files affectively. Period. Adding ram might help up to a certain limit - but retiring the machine would be the best option instead of throwing money down the hole. The machine is ancient for a laptop.

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QFT!!

casey37812 said:

i know that you need a 867mhz powerpc g4 processor. but i was wondering if anybody knew if it would run good on my 550mhz processor with 1gb of ram.

i also was wondering if i upgrade my ram and hard drive if my computer will be able to play videos and movies with no lag. and be able to play halo or counter strike with no lag.

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Sorry, but haha!

Time to upgrade...550 MHz is ancient...hell, the iPod-freakin'-touch has a 532 MHz processor in it now. In your case, you'd need to upgrade everything: your processor, your RAM and your graphics card (wait, did the PowerBook G4s have dedicated graphics?) Dunno, but that'd be ridiculous to spend all that money on upgrading an old laptop. IMHO.

THX1139 said:

I've been a Flash developer on a Mac for years and your comment about Flash not playing nice with a Mac is WRONG. Is that comment based on facts, or are you just pulling that out of your?

The issue the OP has with his G4 is simply that there isn't enough processing power or VRAM to play current media files affectively.

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Well, no, actually, he's quite right.

They play okay on later Macs (albeit slower than on PCs), but on older macs with ATI-based cards (even original Radeons), they really, really don't play nicely. Run a 400 MHz Celeron w/o a video card on flash (YouTube) next to a 500 MHz G4 w/a Radeon. 32 MB is enough VRAM; that isn't the issue (nor is sheer computational power, since we know slower PCs run it fine). They're just bad with flash overlays. The G4 might be faster than the Celeron in pretty much everything (just take yourself back to 2000), but it'll choke on YouTube videos while the Celeron will be plenty happy.

Anyway, I can watch movies just fine on my Beige G3; if you're talking about DivX, anyway. DVDs work okay too, though I generally watch those on my PCs... or TV.

I think your main problem might actually be your HDD; at 10 GB, you probably don't have any real scratch space available, and with only 512 MB RAM you're going to be hitting the disk quite a bit, and w/o any real space available it's basically just thrashing.

Anyway, upgrade the RAM and the drive, but only if you want to keep your machine for email, videos, etc. It won't play Halo, or any games made w/in the last five years, or improve performance on YouTube videos.

They're good machines, but by today's standards they're of course slow.

In your case, you'd need to upgrade everything: your processor, your RAM and your graphics card (wait, did the PowerBook G4s have dedicated graphics?)

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All... PowerBooks since the G3 [and even a bit before] have had dedicated video... and none have been upgradeable, unless you count a VRAM upgrade on the original PB G3s. They've always been mid-grade cards. Hence we'll never get a Radeon 48x0 or a GeForce 98xx.

THX1139 said:

I've been a Flash developer on a Mac for years and your comment about Flash not playing nice with a Mac is WRONG. Is that comment based on facts, or are you just pulling that out of your?

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It's a pretty well known fact that Flash performance is terrible on OS X compared to Windows.