I'm seeking advice on how much performance will be gained on a RAM upgrade. My wife currently has a 1.33 Ghz 12" iBook (OS X 10.4). It has 1 GB of RAM (512 MB on board with 512 MB more in the expansion slot), and it would be about $30-$50 to get 1 GB RAM from Crucial. She uses primarily Microsoft office 2004, Safari and Firefox, with some Pages and iPhoto thrown in. I've noticed a few functions and large files slow her iBook down, and am curious what kind of performance would be gained from the additional 512 MB. Her hard drive has plenty of space and we use MacJanitor on it. We don't plan on getting a new machine any time soon (we also have a fairly new white MacBook) and hope that the iBook will be a trusty computer for productivity applications and surfing the internet (anti-productivity applications?) for plenty more years of use. Thanks for the advice!
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iBook RAM Upgrade
- Thread starter Benjer
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The first thing that pops out at me is that you said you wanted to spend 30-50 getting 1GB of memory, however unless the memory is rare (for some reason unknown to me), it shouldn't cost you that much. I know that I just purchased 2x2GB of RAM for my MPB and it cost me 68, so I would be surprised if a 1x1GB cost you 50. Also, the speed increase would be noticeable, in my opinion, as more things, such as photos and documents, would be on the RAM and thus would be faster to access.
Yeah, the extra 512MB will help a lot. You'll be able to open up more browser tabs and etc. without the dreaded beach ball coming up. It's worth it, to me, to spend a little to keep such a nice machine running at peak performance even if it is just for the occasional word processing and web surfing. As for the price, a 1GB stick of PC-2700 RAM is pretty expensive. The cheapest I've been able to find RAM for my G4 Mac Mini is from Macsales.com and it's at around $30. For your iBook, I found some for $37. Yet, for my MBP, I've been able to get 4GB RAM (2x2GB) at $80 and that was back in April. I'm guessing the old RAM for G4's are becoming obsolete and hard to find, hence the higher prices.