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need help on upgrade 12"powerbook G4!!!!

C

ClaireBearH2O

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 22, 2009
3
0
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I am new here, and I need help on upgrade my laptop.
currently my laptop is 1.33 GHz, 768MB DDR SDRAM, 80 GB HD.
I would love to upgrade my RAM and HD to max,
is anybody can help me with that????
what kind RAM and HD do I need to get?
any suggestion?????
thanks:)
 
I'd advise getting the faster hard drive rather than the biggest. 5400rpm is very good. 7200rpm is even better but I can't seem to find these available anywhere online except on eBay once in a while. If you need lots of storage space, it's best to just get an external firewire drive for your large files, and start a regular back-ups with that external drive as well.

I think 512Mb of RAM is the most you can install in a 12" Powerbook, at least that is the case with my 12" 1GHz Powerbook G4.

Other than that, you can try to locate a faster burning superdrive, or if you have the need to, you can install a firmware modification that will increase your current superdrive burn speed to 16x. You can also install firmware to make the DVD player region-free, to play PAL and NTSC DVDs.

Install an Airport Extreme card... what else?

There's not really anything else you can do.
 
You can also check out Crucial.com for memory. Going to the max of 1.25GB will greatly help. As for the HD, I opted to get an external portable and moved things that I did not use as often off the internal. That gave me more space without the hassle of opening the machine up to install a new internal HD.
 
I have 12" powerbooks. You can upgrade up to 1.5 GB of ram. Go to Crusial for it.

About the hard drive, a fast one won't do any difference, I had a 7200rpm and did nothing but burning out a year later.

Get a big drive instead and do backup oftem.

The 12" have two main problems. The backlight stop working one day and there are no parts to replace them, and sometimes the mother board stop working as well and yours is way dated. I had 4 12", now I have 3 and I have been canibalizing other 12" powerbooks to give life to mines.

So... have back ups of your data.
 
The 1.33 should take a 1 gig pc2700 or pc2100 ddr notebook ram chip for a total of 1.25 gigs. That will help.

As for the hard drive, upgrading it appears to be a tre PITA. Unless your hard drive is filling up, and you can't offload stuff you don't need to an external, I'd avoid it.

I purchased my 1.5 yesterday, with already maxed ram, for a second computer, and I forgot how much I love the form factor and performance of this model for basic tasks. Does the 1.33 have the scrolling trackpad and two finger click?
 
Replacing the hard drive is not a PITA, though. It's very easy to do following repair guides like the ones on ifixit.com.
 
ekoe said:
Replacing the hard drive is not a PITA, though. It's very easy to do following repair guides like the ones on ifixit.com.
Click to expand...

Call me spoiled, but I say it's a PITA. I'd rather pay to have someone who is qualified do it.

But, since we're chatting, I've got the original toshiba 80 gig 5400 rpm hard drive with about 50 gigs left free. I'm guessing that one of the newer, 5400 rpm drives from WD (160 or 320 gigs) would NOT yield a noticeable increase over this one, right?

Under my circumstances, could you come up for a good reason to upgrade the hard drive? Thanks for your advice.
 
clyde2801 said:
Call me spoiled, but I say it's a PITA. I'd rather pay to have someone who is qualified do it.

But, since we're chatting, I've got the original toshiba 80 gig 5400 rpm hard drive with about 50 gigs left free. I'm guessing that one of the newer, 5400 rpm drives from WD (160 or 320 gigs) would NOT yield a noticeable increase over this one, right?

Under my circumstances, could you come up for a good reason to upgrade the hard drive? Thanks for your advice.
Click to expand...

lol, I have way too much pics and video clips ate all my space. since I am going to travel with it, I dont want take external drive with me while I am on the road.
 
thanks to everyone here help me , I dont know much about computer and i am glad that I find this site.
thanks~~~~:)

my next question,
what brand do i need to look for, for RAM and HD?
is max is 1.25GHz???? does really speed up?
if i do get HD, how should I install????
 
ClaireBearH2O said:
lol, I have way too much pics and video clips ate all my space. since I am going to travel with it, I dont want take external drive with me while I am on the road.
Click to expand...

Nor would I want to break the danged thing putting it in. I'd pay to swap it out with a WD drive if the newer drives performed faster than the 4-5 year old one that is in it. Having more space would be nice, and maybe a newer drive would be less prone to die in the next couple of years than my current one, but I really can't come up with a reason to spend the time or money.

BTW, your handle is so darned cute I just want to give it a hug. In a strictly platonic way of course.

Does your trackpad scroll?
 
clyde2801 said:
Nor would I want to break the danged thing putting it in. I'd pay to swap it out with a WD drive if the newer drives performed faster than the 4-5 year old one that is in it. Having more space would be nice, and maybe a newer drive would be less prone to die in the next couple of years than my current one, but I really can't come up with a reason to spend the time or money.
Click to expand...

Hard drive longevity is only about 4-5yrs. You should replace your drive before it fails on you.
 
ekoe said:
Hard drive longevity is only about 4-5yrs. You should replace your drive before it fails on you.
Click to expand...

I was thinking about that today on my morning walk. Especially since the last owner left cs on it. And that way, I've got a clone of my system on it. Either that, or clone the hard drive and start to replace it once it fails.

What's the consensus on the board, should I get out the precision tool set or pay an authorized service provider $80 to put it in after I clone it?
 
That depends on your level of comfort with such a task. It seems you're more inclined to have someone perform the drive swap for you, which is fine.

I do my own because I like to do it, it's easy, you get to know your computer, clean the heatsink, and it's most affordable so you can afford a better hard drive. You can also upgrade your SuperDrive while you're in there.

Personally, I really hate it when someone mars my screws. And it is so easy to bend the bottom casing while working in there, that peeves me too.

As for tools, all you need is an electro-staic discharge wrist strap, a set of hex screws, torq screws, jeweler's screwdrivers and a thin piece of plastic blister pack like what light bulbs come packaged in (this is for separating the top casing from the bottom casing).

My one other point of advice is to use a pair of small pliers to remove the hard drive mount bracket screws... they're small phillips screw heads and are very soft metal. They'll strip if you try to remove them with a phillips head.

Make a bootable clone of your hard drive and back up all your other files separately.

I wouldn't recommend using it until it fails. Why risk losing data? It might also happen at an inconvenient time.
 
ClaireBearH2O said:
thanks to everyone here help me , I dont know much about computer and i am glad that I find this site.
thanks~~~~:)

my next question,
what brand do i need to look for, for RAM and HD?
is max is 1.25GHz???? does really speed up?
if i do get HD, how should I install????
Click to expand...

If you don't know much, then don't go changing the HD yourself. External drives that get powered by USB or FW for your movie is not that big or that heavy.

The max is 1.25GB for the ram, and it will reduce the amount of HD reads when you run your applications, so it will feel faster. It will not for example make Doom run better, but switching between applications and application load times will vastly improve.
 
Please, REALLY, don't worry about not knowing much.

It's not what you know, it's knowing where to find it... and you already found this resource. Go to ifixit.com and look up your model, or go to xlr8urmac (or whatever it's called), observe electro-static discharge safety techniques (i.e.- just wear an esd wriststrap attached to the chassis), be gentle, take your time and have no worries. I'm sure you can do it, plenty of us idiots do.

Worrying about what you don't know won't TEACH you anything!

I'm not here to tell people how NOT to do something.
 
I'll start by cloning the hard drive and then consider the transplant. As for unscrewing the screw behind the ram, does that require a special tool? That's how it looks in the picture...

Oh, and someone mentioned that I may see a performance difference going to a newer drive. I know that once your disk starts filling up, it can slow your system down, but that's not the case with my current one; it's not even half full. Will a new WD drive be that much faster than the four year old toshiba 80 gig it came with? They're both spinning at 5400 rpm...
 
clyde2801 said:
The 1.33 should take a 1 gig pc2700 or pc2100 ddr notebook ram chip for a total of 1.25 gigs. That will help.

As for the hard drive, upgrading it appears to be a tre PITA. Unless your hard drive is filling up, and you can't offload stuff you don't need to an external, I'd avoid it.

I purchased my 1.5 yesterday, with already maxed ram, for a second computer, and I forgot how much I love the form factor and performance of this model for basic tasks. Does the 1.33 have the scrolling trackpad and two finger click?
Click to expand...

No but you can download a firmwire modification to let it scroll.

Its called like 2scroll or something like that
 
ClaireBearH2O,

what brand do i need to look for, for RAM and HD?
is max is 1.25GHz???? does really speed up?
if i do get HD, how should I install????
Click to expand...

Get this Hard Drive: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/WD3200BEVE/

I use a Western Digital 250GB Hard Drive in my PowerBook G4 and it works great. The 320GB is the biggest hard drive that is compatible with your PowerBook G4

To install the hard drive, follow these instructions: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/...2-Inch-1-1-5-GHz-Hard-Drive-Replacement/548/1

Get this RAM:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/2700DDRS1GBA/

I noticed a big difference in going from 768MB to 1.25GB.
 
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