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. 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
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. 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