Upgrading a Powerbook

[aavatsma]

Hi

I have a tibook 867MHz with 768Mb ram.
When using cadprograms in 3d (f.ex. rotating the view in wireframe) it often hangs when the model gets complex.
Also in illustrator, when working on large files (lots of small lines for architecual drawings), the computer hangs when i pan or zoom or do other operations.

I will get a new laptop when i can afford it and my applecare runs out, but until then I am thinking about a minor upgrade.

Will I see good results if I upgrade to 1gb of ram? That will cost me 150$ where i live.

Another possibility is to upgrade the harddisk to a 60gb 7200rpm (I now have the original 4500rpm 40gb). A disk like that will be almost 200$.

I could use some extra diskspace anyway, so maybe I will do both upgrades. But I would like to hear what you think about performancegains.

Armas

 

[Peterkro]

The ram update will help.I'd suggest getting a external hard drive(same or similar price) and put a clean install of OSX on it and use it purely for your CAD programs.

 

[Col. Panic]

If your laptop is paging out a lot of information to the hard disk (scratch disk) then upgrading that would also help. I think the system uses up the available RAM first, though. So I would make RAM the first upgrade.

Others could probably speak to this better than I but your machine might also be choking trying to redraw the complex files on screen. If this is the case you are out of luck as the graphics card is not upgradeable in the PB.

Craig

 

[mad jew]

I've got an iBook with similar specs (800MHz and 640Mb) and I noticed quite a jump in its CAD performance when I upgraded the internal hard drive. As someone who travels a lot with my laptop, I couldn't stand having to cart an external hard drive around with me. I haven't needed to upgrade the RAM but I imagine that would be even more beneficial! 🙂