Suggestions on Powerbook G4 upgrades

Ok so for 500 you can do a lot.

First, another 1 GB stick of RAM, but knowing apple, you have 2 512s in it. So 2 GB of RAM (2 sticks) will run you about 80 bucks.

Then OS 10.4 Tiger will run beautifully on that. bout 50-70 bucks on craigslist or ebay.

A 250 GB Western Digital scorpio UATA HDD About 90 bucks

And that's the simple stuff.

For HDD, go to OWC or TigerDirect
For RAM go to crucial

What are you doing, or plan to be doing with it? Since you don't mention any specific programs, I'm assuming you're just going to be doing light work, consumer programs with it like browsing, word processing, email, etc.

Ditto on what's been said about upping the ram and hd. If they make a 7200 rpm hd that'll fit in your unit, get that along with the ram.

Oh, and 10.5 should run in your unit, and I think it'll be usable with 2 gigs of ram.

My depression baby (1st gen ) father finally broke down last summer and bought his first mac...a g4 1.07 ghz ibook with a 30 gig hd and a disk reader and 10.4! Since he still insists on using his juno ten dollars a month dial up (which probably explains why he's sitting on a pile of money in the bank and I'm not), I took his ibook to my house to download all the system updates.

And despite the age, chip, memory and express card, it was still a quite usable machine on a broadband connection. It was quite usable and comparable to a modern netbook. Sorry to ramble, but I perfectly understand your decision to keep going forward with your g4 pb.

I'm looking to do the same, however the 80GB HDD is doing me fine with no problems but merely want to do the RAM. The machine is a PB12 1.5ghz with 758MB of RAM (roughly) and wish to max it out at the 1.25GB.

Will I see a noticeable increase?

I plan on keeping this machine until it dies. Unfortunately the battery is most likely on it's last legs.

MistaBungle said:

I'm looking to do the same, however the 80GB HDD is doing me fine with no problems but merely want to do the RAM. The machine is a PB12 1.5ghz with 758MB of RAM (roughly) and wish to max it out at the 1.25GB.

Will I see a noticeable increase?

I plan on keeping this machine until it dies. Unfortunately the battery is most likely on it's last legs.

Click to expand...

What does activity monitor tell you? Do you have any page outs? Does the ram usage max out when you use it normally?

I mean, if the current config works for you, great. But compared to how cheap ram is now, I think that would be a worthwhile update. What would a gig stick cost, like what, fifty or a hundred bucks?