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powerdave

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 24, 2004
148
0
Hamburg
Hi all,
hopefully not a topic that's beaten to death at this stage, although I gather most of the Macrumors population has already moved on to newer tech :(

My 1.33Ghz G4 Powerbook has turned 4 years old and I'm really seeing a lot of that spinning beachball these days. Really I'm just using it to browse the net these days, but with lots of tabs open and flash laden websites, it really struggles to keep up. :D I'd love to replace it with a new machine but I think (/hope) this still has some life in it, so I was hoping you could tell me what my options are-

RAM: I've got 1Gb (two 500Mb sticks). Pity, as maxing it out to 2Gb means I have to throw both of those away. Anyway, I guess this is the first thing I should do, will I see much of an increase in performance?

HD: Upgrading to a 7200rpm hard disk with a presumably larger cache? Any speed increase here? Long shot? I guess not so effective cause I don't spend my day messing with large files.

OS: Yep, I run 10.3 still. This is annoying me recently as I've realised you need to have at least 10.4 to use new iPods, iPhones etc. Nice one, Apple. Anyway, is upgrading to Leopard a major step backward in terms of performance here, or should it affect me much?

Anything else? I guess RAM is the most straight forward option- I guess the question is how much of a difference it will make, or am I just burning money? RAM is not too bad these days.. 2Gb will cost me around €150.

I don't really want to go all out and spend hundreds on what could after all next week turn out to be a nice looking, but very much cold and dead, four year old laptop.

Suggestions on a postcard please :)

Thanks!

David
 

11800506

macrumors 65816
Oct 31, 2007
1,060
1
Washington D.C. Area
2 GB of Ram costing 150€? In the US, 2GB of Ram costs around $40, so I'm sure you can find it for cheaper than 150€. Then again, Europe's prices could be different, but I wouldn't think they would be that much different. Also, you could upgrade to Tiger which wouldn't have too much of a performance penalty and would be pretty cheap now that Leopard is out. Adding 2GB should help a lot, but if it is still running slowly, you might want to back up your data on an external hard drive and do a fresh install.

EDIT: I looked up the prices for 2gb of Ram for your 1.33 ghz Powerbook and I see that they are more than $40, but still less than 150€, more like around $110
 

powerdave

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 24, 2004
148
0
Hamburg
Yeah, you might be right about the price. I just took a quick look on Crucial's German site and it was 57 euro for one stick, plus tax and shipping.. so 145-ish for the two shipped together, I didn't compare with any other sites though.

A fresh install is a good idea too, I'd be willing to do that. I was about to order a 2,5" external drive (was going to get a WD Passport 320Gb...) but I found a few posts which argued that the Powerbook G4 doesn't provide enough power through the USB ports to power it, so I'd have to get a Y cable, and for me that takes the convenience out of it, since I've only got the two ports on this thing. Some people say it does work on Powerbooks, but only the newer ones... so I don't know, I'll check that out before I order. And yeah, I've seen cheaper ext. drives out there, but I was trying to get something that was portable and doesn't look completely like recycled plastic.
 

Eric Lewis

macrumors 68020
Feb 4, 2007
2,380
1
CANADA? eh?
maybe a fresh install of the OS?

my fresh 10.5.2 and 1.5gb of ram..well leopard runs smooth and fine

i have the same model
 

crees!

macrumors 68020
Jun 14, 2003
2,014
239
MD/VA/DC
Definitely get more RAM. When I upped mine from 512Mb to 1.5Gb I noticed the difference immediately. As for Leopard, I love it. Only thing that bugs me is the Dock can be a little sluggish at times and Spotlight not always keeps up with my typing. Beachball, yea - here and there, usually with Safari and that's if I have 10+ tabs open.
 

steeler

macrumors regular
Jan 30, 2008
164
4
If you upgrade to 2GB RAM, you'll notice a big difference. I did with my PB G4. If you only have a 4200 rpm hard drive right now, you may notice a difference with a new 5400 or 7200 rpm drive, but nowhere near the bang you'll get for your buck on the RAM.
 

Consultant

macrumors G5
Jun 27, 2007
13,314
34
Get more Ram, unless you have the 12" in which the max ram is lower.

Clean install of 10.4 will improve speed if you can get a copy. As to 10.5 performance, I am not sure whether you want 10.5 or not.

Most WD 2.5" drives requires abnormal amount of power and does not work on one usb port on most PowerBooks. Many other 2.5" work fine. I use firewire powered drive.

Internal HD will improve speed, especially if you only have a 4200rpm 60gb drive, but it's quite a bit of hassle in the 12" PB, and still challenging in other versions of PowerBooks.
 

zuskie

macrumors newbie
May 1, 2008
8
0
A slight change in topic...

I have a 14" iBook G4. The battery lasts all of 20mins. Suggestions where to get a replacement?
 

0098386

Suspended
Jan 18, 2005
21,574
2,908
I'm planning on maxing out my PowerBooks ram, maybe a new HDD as well. Got this baby 4 years too! Needed a small laptop for university and jumped into the world of Apple with it.
 

acearchie

macrumors 68040
Jan 15, 2006
3,264
104
Im another one for the RAM upgrade! It definately benefitted my 12" powerbook from 512mb to 1.25gb...

It was like a new machine!
 

notjustjay

macrumors 603
Sep 19, 2003
6,056
167
Canada, eh?
The previous responders have summed it up well. I recently upgraded my 12" PB with a new hard drive (no choice; the old one died!) and maxed the RAM to 1.25 gigs. Running a fresh Tiger install, it was great. I installed Leopard, which seems to run a bit slower, but so far for everyday tasks it runs well.

The bottleneck actually appears to be the video card. In today's age of graphic intensive applications and high resolution screens, I find the poor little card can't keep up. The screensavers are a good example. They run fine on one monitor at a time, but try to put the screen saver on in a dual-monitor setup, and it chokes.

This PB celebrates its 5th birthday this year, but I'm starting to wonder if I should sell it and move on to a 15" MBP.
 

dbwie

macrumors 6502a
Jun 11, 2007
604
253
Albuquerque, NM, USA
my older G4

I have an old G4 TiBook, the 550Mhz. It seemed a big sluggish with Tiger. I got a nice boost in performance when upgrading to a 7200 rpm hard drive and maxing out the RAM. Got both the RAM and hard drive from OWC. I upgraded the hard drive from the stock drive first, and that gave the best performance boost. Maxing my RAM (from 512 up to 1 GB on my machine) gave an additional, but perceptably smaller, boost after the hard drive upgrade.

Also, the new hard drive is much quieter than the stock drive that came in my TiBook.
 

bektravels

macrumors regular
Sep 14, 2007
103
0
Australia
The previous responders have summed it up well. I recently upgraded my 12" PB with a new hard drive (no choice; the old one died!) and maxed the RAM to 1.25 gigs.

Howdy! Out of interest, how big is the hard drive you put in? I'm keen to upsize my HD in my 12" 1.33 but I'm finding it hard to figure out what/if there's a max size you can go to.

250gb would be ideal:) Will max it out to 1.25gb ram too...

Thx
B.
 

thesheep

macrumors regular
Mar 27, 2006
131
9
There is absolutely no reason why this machine must feel sluggish when doing 'normal' stuff like surfing the web.

Personally I recommend the single best thing you can do is get a copy of Tiger (probably you can find one really, really cheap) or Leopard and do a clean install of that (not an upgrade). I think that will sort everything out.

Getting more RAM is an option if you have a bit more cash or want to do more intensive tasks. But for web browsing, 1GB should be plenty.
 

nsbio

macrumors 6502a
Aug 8, 2006
634
0
NC
I was on the same boat - upgraded my 15'' 1.5GhZ PB from 10.3 straight to 10.5 (clean install, not upgrade). The system is running as fast as 10.3 or faster. I would not hesitate to do it unless you are totally dependent on some Classic app.
 

thomasp

macrumors 6502a
Sep 18, 2004
654
1
UK
If you can, get hold of Tiger - that seems to transform G4's - runs perfectly fine on my 3yr old 1.5GHz PowerBook (2GB) RAM, and gave a Dual 867MHz G4 with 1Gb RAM a totally new lease of life.

And it works "ok" on a 500MHz G3 iBook with only 384Mb RAM :D Few beachballs, but that's only really when browsing the web.
 

shahr04360

macrumors regular
Jun 4, 2007
140
59
GMT+8
Willkommen David,

I don't really want to go all out and spend hundreds on what could after all next week turn out to be a nice looking, but very much cold and dead, four year old laptop.....

Go ebay, point to spare-part you are looking for. It's so worth and fun upgrading your powerbook by DIY from reputable seller. The price much affordable compared with to the brand-new part. Start by toping-up your ram. Then, takes time to upgrade the others. If you not sure, let Apple certified do install them for you.

Viel Glück!
 
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