I bought a second hand mac....problems

[Glanical]

Hi, i just bought a G4 Ibook second hand, when i first got it it was freezing just the same as amys, after erasing and re installing it was still doing it..... so i took out the ram, as the person who sold it had just added extra. Its seems to be fine now, its not freezing but its not very fast and sometimes even when its performing a simple task the multicoloured wheel starts to spin, and sometimes the mouce jumps.... do you think the ibook is too old or faulty, shall i give it back or is this normal? if anyone could shed some light? im abit of a novice... thanks!

 

[technicolor]

How much ram is in the machine after removing the added ram?

What tasks were you doing when you got the beachball?

Sounds like it had bad ram in it.

 

[bartelby]

Did you try reseating the RAM before removing it totally?

If you did and it continued to freeze, it sounds like bad RAM.

The slowness could be due to the reduced RAM.
How much is in there now, and how much was in there?



EDIT: DOH!! too slow...

 

[Scarlet Fever]

sounds like the additional RAM was bad, but im a novice when it comes to RAM so i'm not positive.

The other symptoms you provided just mean the computer doesn't have as much power as the system would like. RAM for G4 iBooks should be pretty cheap now; some of the members here may even have some RAM from an iBook which they can sell.

It sounds like your computer is in good working condition, bar the bad RAM. Congrats on your purchase!

EDIT: 3 posts in 2 minutes... ForumSpy seems to be popular!

 

[Glanical]

thanks for the info! i feel alot better now i know it was probably only the dodgy ram. As it is at the moment I now have 128MB of ram, which is what the ibook originally came with. How much additional ram do you think i need? thanks!

 

[bartelby]

thanks for the info! i feel alot better now i know it was probably only the dodgy ram. As it is at the moment I now have 128MB of ram, which is what the ibook originally came with. How much additional ram do you think i need? thanks!

When it comes to RAM I go by the logic of "As much as you can afford/squeeze into the machine"

 

[Frisco]

thanks for the info! i feel alot better now i know it was probably only the dodgy ram. As it is at the moment I now have 128MB of ram, which is what the ibook originally came with. How much additional ram do you think i need? thanks!

128 MB No wonder why you are getting beachballs (multicoloured wheels).


Get as much RAM as your computer will support.

 

[eRondeau]

thanks for the info! i feel alot better now i know it was probably only the dodgy ram. As it is at the moment I now have 128MB of ram, which is what the ibook originally came with. How much additional ram do you think i need? thanks!

128MB isn't nearly enough for Tiger. I'm running a 1GHz iBook G4 with 640MB of RAM and I'm very happy with the performance. I rarely see the spinning beachball. (Your iBook shipped with 2 x 128MB chips for a total of 256MB; one of those two chips had to be removed and sacrificed in order to seat the expansion RAM. My November 2003 iBook was the same. I'm running 128MB base + 512MB expansion. Later iBook's came with 256MB base on one chip and an empty second slot.)

 

[CyberB0b]

How much additional ram do you think i need?

I was in the same situation. I went to macsales dot com (no I am not a spam bot) and got an extra 512mb stick that said it was the same as Apple factory installed, cost less than 70 clams.

Best purchase I ever made.