Restoring iBook G4, will it do any good?

[Chris3125]

I've had my ibook G4 for nearly two years now and it seems to be seriously slowing up, this could be because i recently bought a 24" imac fully loaded and its just by comparison but i was wondering, i've got restore discs and was wondering if i restored the ibook to original settings and wiped it clean would it increase speed at all? things like opening app's and stuff just take forever.

i used mac for a while now but i'm not really familiar when it comes to formatting and that sort of thing

any advice would be greatly appreciated

Regards

Chris

 

[duncandeath]

I book restore

You can do an achive and restore so you don't lose all your data. This works quite well.

Have you got many 3rd party apps installed?

How much harddrive space do you have left?

 

[Chris3125]

ye i have got quite a few, also i have ilife 07 installed but dont have the disc to reinstall it, would an archive restore push it back to 06? how would i go about this?

 

[TraceyS/FL]

How'd you get iLife 07???????????

You are probably just dealing with the fast to the slow computer. I have an 800mhz G4 iBook, 1.25mhz G4 eMac and new 17" MBP.

I can "deal" with jumping down to the eMac, the iBook is torture..... neither is a joy after using the MBP.

 

[Eidorian]

How much RAM do you have in the iBook? If you haven't maxed it out that's probably why it feels so slow.

 

[Chris3125]

lol my bad, got ilife 06, originally had 05

got 1.5 gb ram, upgraded from the original 512mb

 

[Eidorian]

I've been using a lot of ~800 MHz G4's and they have felt a little slow lately. It's fine for web browsing and e-mail but you'll start to notice it when you open more applications.

Reinstalling OS X will give a little speed boost but don't expect much. I suggest taking the archive and install route as mentioned earlier.

 

[duncandeath]

im pretty sure it will leave ilife alone if its not the version on the restore disk. But im not %100 on that.

I found my system got slow if I had less than 10 gigs of harddrive space.

To do the achive and restore just use the system discs and choose the achive and restore option.

Im sure it will speed your system up to some degree.

 

[leekohler]

I do clean installs on all my computers once a year. It keeps them running well. I know it's not totally necessary, but it makes me feel secure knowing the system software is fresh.

 

[4JNA]

agree that the re-install will help a bit. depending on how you feel about spending money on the ibook, you could also add a new bigger/faster hard drive to help speed it up. the newer 5400 or 7200rpm 16mb cache drives make a big difference when it comes to apps/load times. the original drive you have is a 4200rpm drive = slooooowwww.

or sell it on ebay for crazy money and buy a refurb macbook as a good match for the 24"