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LightDemon69

macrumors member
Original poster
Feb 3, 2008
85
0
Levan, Utah
I have a 1.07 GHz iBook G4 that I recently upgraded from 384MB to 1.25GB of RAM. I did this like 30 minutes ago and have noticed next to no change. I've heard that adding RAM makes the computer go WAY faster, but mine is so similar you wouldn't even notice the change unless you knew that I added RAM. So my question is: What exactly does adding more RAM speed up, and how much. The only reason that I added the RAM was to upgrade from Panther to Leopard, and wanted as many upgrades as possible to do this.
 
On my iMac (went from 2 to 4 gigs) I noticed, using iStat pro, that the page out and page in stats improved. Meaning they dropped to zero. Also when using vmware for windows, that whole piece ran much better. MS Office runs faster.
That's about it.

ps... booting up and closing down now takes longer... go figure.
 
On my iMac (went from 2 to 4 gigs) I noticed, using iStat pro, that the page out and page in stats improved. Meaning they dropped to zero. Also when using vmware for windows, that whole piece ran much better. MS Office runs faster.
That's about it.

ps... booting up and closing down now takes longer... go figure.

My pageouts usually sits at zero now, though I get a few of those if I don't reboot my Mac for a week or so.

With more RAM, I suppose it takes longer to check all of it during boot; and more stuff to clear out when shutting down.

Also, for Safe Sleep, the sleep image file on disk now takes up 4gigs, and does add quite a few more seconds to the time needed for the Mac to sleep.
 
I went from 512 mb ro 2 g in my macbook and noticed a huge difference in nearly every aspect of my laptop. Everything loaded faster, ran better, and I could have many more apps opened without killing performance.
 
If you are just surfing the internet and using Safari, you are not going to notice that much of a change. This is all dependent on your internet supplier. No amount of Ram is going to change that.
 
As I've used it through the day, I've noticed that it doesn't make any particular app run any faster than usual (besides Office '04), but makes it so there is next to know slow down at all when I have several apps open. For example, right now I have Firefox, iTunes, Adium, and Word all open and have absolutely no slowdown. Thanks for all the help guys.
 
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