I have an iBook G3 refurb on its way, should be coming Saturday. My question is about the RAM though. It's a 900mhz G3 with 256mb RAM, and 40gb HDD. It's going to be running OS X 10.3. For now I only plan to run iTunes and internet, e-mail, light stuff. I plan to max it at 640mb soon, but not right now. You think for the time being that 256mb should be enough for my iTunes and smaller things? Eventually I want to use iMovie and some other things, but by than I should be at 640. So, basically I'm just asking if at 256mb, will it still be sufficent enough to run those apps smoothly for say maybe a week or two before I get the 512 stick? Thanks.
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iBook G3
- Thread starter Frankf300
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For Panther, it'll probably be enough for the time being. I would limit your open applications to two max, just for sanity's sake. So iTunes plus whatever else. You can always keep your eye on memory usage in Activity Monitor. If your free memory and inactive memory are close to zero, then you'll definitely notice a slowdown. If you can keep your pageouts at zero, then you won't notice any slowdown.
Install Tiger (If you can). I have exactly the same iBook (And the same plans, 640meg o' RAM soon) and it runs tiger/dashboard/spotlight/etc rather well actually, I was surprised. I can't tell you how well iTunes runs, I don't use it on my iBook, I use an iTunes Remote to control my Mac Mini. Also running ARD, that runs well, very well. Safari is good, as is everything. It will be worlds better with the maxed out RAM, some of the animation is a bit slow, it still only takes about 30seconds to boot I don't have that much installed though.