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1 gig no longer enough? (iBook G4)

V

Vinnie_vw

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Sep 16, 2005
291
0
the Netherlands
Hi all,
I consider myself a recent switcher, well I bought my first iBook ca. 2 years ago, a 12" 1.33 Ghz. After a short while I shifted the ram up to 1 gig and noticed that the speed increased enough to make it a comfortable experience. Note: I don't play games or run graphic apps, I just write and listen to/view media. And everything else considered, the iBook is a perfect machine: light, long battery-life, matte screen, and affordable.

Since a few weeks now, I've had a ton of problems. Safari 3, which is generally great, has been hanging and even when I force-quit it, it remained locked in the dock for some reason. Only a restart helped.

Itunes is very laggy, but that is probably due to my large music-collection, which I recently added to it.

iPhoto, the new one, is very laggy also.

Just now, I had to restart my mac again because everything froze. I'm leaning everything, for the gazillionth time, with Onyx now. I noticed that the mds-process (which runs Spotlight) is often consuming lots of energy also.

So, my question is: Is this a ram problem? Is 1 gig no longer enough? I noticed that Apple has been pushing 2 gigs in its machines now, perhaps a sign that their apps—and those are mainly my problem—require more ram? Will it help if I upgrade to 1.5 gigs or ram—the max an iBook can take?

Please advise. Thanks!
 
How full is the hard disk? My old PowerBook G4 used to run nicely with 1.25GB of RAM but when it started running out of disk space it got really sluggish. I managed to free up 9GB the other day just by deleting one of the log files! If your disk is getting full then I'd suggest you run WhatSize to see what's taking up the most space... try this before spending money on more RAM :)
 
Take a look at the System Memory tab of Activity Monitor after you've been using your computer for a while. I would be ideal to look while you are having problem, but obviously, if every thing's frozen you won't be able to do that.

Also, are you out of disk space?

Maybe Spotlight has gone crazy. Here's a procedure to reset it: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301562
(you could try leaving your drive in the privacy tab to see if that helps.)
 
Thanks for the help, guys. I managed to find another couple 100 mb, not much, which I could loose. I'm now up to 1 gig of free space on my system-drive and have another gig free on my dedicated swap-drive (which, before you ask, has worked great so far). Would that be enough?
 
Vinnie_vw said:
Thanks for the help, guys. I managed to find another couple 100 mb, not much, which I could loose. I'm now up to 1 gig of free space on my system-drive and have another gig free on my dedicated swap-drive (which, before you ask, has worked great so far). Would that be enough?
Click to expand...

Yikes, that'll definitely be the problem. Anything less than 5GB free and my PowerBook just doesn't function properly. Have you tried out WhatSize? (see my previous post) You might find that it's one of the log files that's gotten out of control and hogging lots of disk space. You could also delete stuff such as printer drivers or applications you don't use - Garageband loops take up a lot of space.
 
i've also got the same ibook. mine was ok with 512 except with coverflow and adobe bridge. i've now got 1.5GB and everything runs beautifully (except magic garageband which doesn't work at all), so as has been suggested to you i don't think it's RAM but your full hard drive.
 
Hmm, looks like I might have to look at getting a bigger hard-drive instead of more ram then. I did try WhatSize and removed a few hundred megs, but the problem is really that I dedicated 6 GB to my system-drive (which I was told was enough) and keep my swap, user-files, and applications on separate partitions (which until now has worked out fine). And right now I only seem to be able to find 1 gig of free space on that drive...
 
Vinnie_vw said:
Hmm, looks like I might have to look at getting a bigger hard-drive instead of more ram then. I did try WhatSize and removed a few hundred megs, but the problem is really that I dedicated 6 GB to my system-drive (which I was told was enough) and keep my swap, user-files, and applications on separate partitions (which until now has worked out fine). And right now I only seem to be able to find 1 gig of free space on that drive...
Click to expand...

obviously i am not sufficiently knowledgeable cos i have no idea what that all means :D
 
dcv said:
How full is the hard disk? My old PowerBook G4 used to run nicely with 1.25GB of RAM but when it started running out of disk space it got really sluggish. I managed to free up 9GB the other day just by deleting one of the log files! If your disk is getting full then I'd suggest you run WhatSize to see what's taking up the most space... try this before spending money on more RAM :)
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link to What Size. I had never heard of it before but managed to free 12gb on my macbook.
 
Hah, I found out what the problem was. It was my iTunes library, I recently added around 100 GB of music to it. Apparently the way that ITunes stores that information, consumes either insane amounts of ram or insane amounts of swap. In my case, every-time I opened iTunes it a. took around 2 mins to open and b. consumed around 150 mb of swap, until it filled my swap-drive and brought trouble.

I really hope that Apple will be changing this as the 160GB iPod Classic libraries start becoming more common.
 
have you checked for outrageously large log files???
those can be deleted without a problem. if a program needs it, it can recreate it and more times than not, it makes a smaller than the previous file.
 
@sbluetruck read the post above yours. I have identified the problem as being a large iTunes-library.

And to answer your question, I have run Whatsize and have found nothing regarding logs that I could clean (I wish!), as well as running Onyx. But thanks for the suggestion.

I sincerely hope that Apple will release an Itunes which works better with large libaries. And I think someone with a 160 GB ipod might be in real trouble.

The only solution I could come up with now is to delete everything and add albums again as I want to listen to them. The multiple-library option is too tedious. Besides, I'm not sure how well that would work with syncing an iPod...
 
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