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Powerbook to old??

F

fjs08

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 25, 2003
1,252
0
Hi,

I have a 30 month old Ti Powerbook. Works great, but I was playing on my wifes one year old ThinkPad and noticed how much faster hers is than my PB. On the web, the screen redraws, and page movements are blazing. Is it that my Powerbook may just be to old and slow, or is there something else that I can do to improve the speed of my Powerbook.
Thanks.
Frank
 
I wouldn't bother spending money on upgrading the hardware because you'll just uncover more bottlenecks. Just make sure you have a healthy amount of free space (6GB plus) and avoid having unnecessarily large amounts of apps open at one time. Whether you need a new computer really comes down to whether you can justify it. :)
 
>>Just make sure you have a healthy amount of free space (6GB plus)<<

How can I tell??

>>and avoid having unnecessarily large amounts of apps open at one time.<,

That may be a problem. I usually have Mail, Firefox, Safari, Entourage, Excel at least. I may have to shorten the list some.

Frank
 
Up the RAM to 1gb at least, and you should notice a little snappier response. Go with more RAM if you can.

Up the harddrive speed on a PowerBook? I hear that reply every once in a while, and I don't understand why people suggest this. It requires quite a lot to replace the harddrive in a Powerbook. I would not bother with this option.

Unless they are suggesting an external Harddrive.
 
GimmeSlack12 said:
Up the RAM to 1gb at least, and you should notice a little snappier response. Go with more RAM if you can.

Up the harddrive speed on a PowerBook? I hear that reply every once in a while, and I don't understand why people suggest this. It requires quite a lot to replace the harddrive in a Powerbook. I would not bother with this option.

Unless they are suggesting an external Harddrive.
Click to expand...

Uh, on the Tibooks, any second grader with steady hands can replace the hard drive. I have. 10 minutes or less. Not like other PBs.

Yeah, at 7200rpms and 1gig, whatever Tibook he's got will be much FASTER. Also use delocalizer to free up more disc space.
 
I agree. Changing the hard drive on a TiBook is incredibly easy. It's actually iBooks that are the tricky ones. 12" PowerBooks are a bit annoying, but I can do them in under 10 minutes. The only real issue is that increasing the hard drive speed can be a fair bit of money, for a fairly minimal performance increase.

As for the memory though, with what you run, I'd say try and have between 512 and 1GB in the machine. You don't need 1GB, especially considering the cost of 512MB PC133 SODIMMs...
 
be carefull when doing the tibooks HD, while easy to get at the frame is a tad brittle and i once broke a bit off because i was trying to unscrew something the wrong way :S, just dont apply much force on anything.
 
>>Up the RAM to 1gb at least, and you should notice a little snappier response. Go with more RAM if you can.<,

I have 512 RAM. It's three years old. Sounds like a good reason to get one of the new Intel based ones in a few months. I'd love to get a 17". Guess I'll just wait a while and be envious of my wifes Thinkpad<g>. BTW, the one thing I miss most when I play around with her computer is Expose. You just don't realize how often you shift from program to program. It's a pain in XP. I have my Ti Book programmed into the scroll button on the top of my Mighty Mouse and do it almost without thinking now.

Oh, and can anyone get the video's from MSNBC.com to play on their Mac. Everything else from every other news source plays, except the videos from msnbc.com.

Thanks.

Frank
 
fjs08Oh said:
, and can anyone get the video's from MSNBC.com to play on their Mac. Everything else from every other news source plays, except the videos from msnbc.com.
Click to expand...
Seeing as how it's "MSNBC", I would guess the video is in Windows Media Video (aka WMV) format. To play WMV files, you would need to have Windows Media Player installed. Or you could download the Flip4Mac WMV plug-in.

Check out www.mactopia.com for Windows Media Player and flip4mac.com for the QT plug-in.

ft
 
>>Windows Media Player installed. <<

I have it. It plays the Windows files from any other site or e-mail attachment, except from msnbc?? Strange.

Frank
 
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