Serious: Makes more RAM my iBook G4 faster?

[Falkenberg]

Hi everybody,
I have recently upgraded from G3-700 MHz iBook to G4-1000 MHz...
... and was dissapointed. The speed increase is less than what I have expected, when writing text, email etc. (No games or anything CPU-heavy!).

So, what to do to make the iBook faster? Currentyl I have 256 MB RAM. Will another 256 MB make a seriuos difference with regard to speed?

Cheerio

 

[Jo-Kun]

off course it will... 256Mb is the bare minimum...

I used to have a Ti-Book 400 with 256 and Jaguar on it... very slow, then I upgraded to 1GB and it was nice (still not fast because of the processor) ran multile programs at the same time without complining... thats why you need more ram...

 

[rdowns]

Yes, more RAM will improve the performance. 256 is the bare minimum for running OS X. If you're not doing any heavy lifting, upgrading to 512 should be fine.

 

[Chip NoVaMac]

As others have said, yes it will.

I would suggest however, if you can afford it, go with a 512mb memory upgrade (768mb total).

 

[bubbamac]

What they said. You should have one open slot, put a 512 chip in it, for a total of 768.

Don't bother going up to a Gig - I spent the money for my TiBook, and was NOT impressed with the speed difference between 768 and 1 Gig.

Good luck!

 

[Sun Baked]

Too little RAM is equivalent to using the HD for RAM and they only have a bandwidth of 40-50MB/sec -- something a G3 could easily keep up with.

The G4s have a "saturated" FSB bandwidth of 1GB/sec -- many times quicker than having too little memory.

The Virtual Memory is great, since we don't ge out of memory errors, but it's slow -- and OS X requires a lot of RAM to avoid using Virtual Memory.

 

[Falkenberg]

Thanks a lot everybody!!!!!