macbook slower than ibook?

[ry4n]

I just got my new MacBook in. I gave my sister my 12" ibook (1.2 ghz g4). It's a real beauty but its noticeably slower. Granted I got the lowest version, but it still seems like it should be an upgrade from my previous 'book. Applications launch really slow and it's very choppy and loves the beach ball. Could this be something as easy as a RAM issue? My old one was snappy, and that's what I'm looking for. (This is a 1.8 duo with 512 ram). Any ideas?

 

[pablake]

Almost certainly RAM. I did the same journey from ibook to low end macbook and couldn't quite believe how slow the macbook was. I bumped the RAM up to 1 gb - it now flies and is much faster than my old ibook....

 

[mkrishnan]

It probably is RAM, particularly if you're using any PPC binaries. And you certainly probably want more RAM than that. But you can verify for yourself whether or not RAM is an issue by opening Activity Monitor and looking at your page-out number.

 

[bluecomb7878]

I've noticed the same thing, and I think its for a good amount of reasons. If you don't have tiger on your ibook, but do on your macbook, i think that's a major issue. Tiger uses a great deal more overhead in terms of RAM, running spotlight and dashboard and such. I have a gig in my macbook and it never has more than 400 MB or so free, even with no app's open at all. Another major factor is most likely that you are running older app's on the intel mac. People don't realize it, but intel macs are effectively emulating PowerPC processor assembly, thus taking extra processor power to do the same tasks. If you throw in another 512MB of ram in your Macbook it'll have some room to breathe, and be able to perform well better than the ibook, but it probably wont reach full potential until there's at least 1.5 gigs in there.

Hope this helped at least a little.

 

[Chundles]

Another major factor is most likely that you are running older app's on the intel mac. People don't realize it, but intel macs are effectively emulating PowerPC processor assembly, thus taking extra processor power to do the same tasks.

Only for apps that aren't universal yet (for most people that's Office and Creative Suite). Anything else, including all Apple's applications are Universal and run fully natively on both processors - much, much faster on Intel procs though.

I would say the problems here are, 1. Not enough RAM and 2. Using apps that require Rosetta emulation such as Word, Excel and Photoshop.