RAM Upgrade = Speed Boost?
 

A friend of mine has a white iBook G3 700 MHz, and almost everything runs extremely slow, such as simply minimizing a window, launching an application, etc. She got it Xmas 2002, and when it was new, I do not remember it being this slow at all.

She's not the most knowledgable about computers - well, maintainence at least. It was only about 5 months ago that she repaired permissions for the first time...

Anyways, my question is - she currently has 256MB of RAM on it. She's thinking of upgrading another 512MB RAM to have a total of 768MB.

Will this upgrade significantly improve the overall speed performance of her computer? Others who we have talked to have said it will not make much of a difference -- only if she runs apps like Photoshop.

Is it worth the $150? If not, what would you suggest to do to improve speed?

Thanks

RAM itself doesn't speed up anything. The benefit of adding RAM is to remove bottlenecks associated with not having enough RAM for the work being done. If she only uses one or two non-heavy-duty programs, maybe adding RAM won't help and the problem is somewhere else. If she normally runs many programs at once, adding RAM is almost guaranteed to help.

Though, 256MB is definitely bottom of the barrel. She should see noticeable benefit at 512, and some benefit at 768, but whether she sees improvement at 1GB does depend on whether she runs multiple big apps.

Even Photoshop should not be too slow if editing small web images, but larger multi-megapixel images require much more RAM, like from a newer digital camera.

Also, how much free space is on her hard disk? OS X and Windows can get quite cranky if there isn't much space left for VM swap files and application temp files.

It shouldn't be painfully slow...a G3/700 should be at least OK. My G3/500 is OK, though it can't compare to my 1.25GHz G4.

Is she aware of how many apps she runs? Some less experienced users forget to quit apps, so they hang around, each eating a little CPU and RAM, or more if documents were left open. It's not supposed to matter that much, but it can on 256MB.

Adding 512 MB means taking the existing 128MB out of the only slot, so she will end up with 640MB (not 768MB).
Will the result be 'significant improvement'? Eh, probably not. Will there be noticeable improvement? likely! Giving OS X more memory to use should give an apparent performance improvement, through more efficient use of caching, less need for the system to 'page out', or utilize the hard drive for temporary space, and other factors. 'significant' will be in the opinion of the user. Adding memory, with other possible software maintenance, removing old caches, running an 'update prebinding' (if OS X is older than 10.3), some other routine maintenance, can help give a real performance boost. Assuming the hard drive is still operating properly, she should have a system that is more stable, fewer 'spinning-wait' cursors, just a lot smoother operation.

Thanks for the quick reply -

Yes, I did forget to mention that she does usually have about 3 - 5 (not including Finder) apps running pretty much all the time. Though they aren't usually heavy-duty apps, mostly just apps such as iTunes, Mail, Word, Safari..

When she does use Photoshop, the size of the images are somewhat large (somewhere around twice the default size -- 7x5 I believe? She scans pencil drawings and colors them in Photoshop)

Yes, I forgot to mention that too -- she has around 7 GB left on her HDD. And although it isn't painfully slow, it is "annoyingly" slow, to me at least. But then again, I have a PB G4 (w/768MB RAM, but only about 4 GB left on my HDD) and it runs as smooth as ever. (I only have about 2 - 4 apps running at a time, but I'm getting off subject..)

I highly doubt she'll be getting another computer anytime soon, so this has to last through at least college.. and I can't imagine struggling through with a measly 256 MB of RAM..

Any other thoughts?

Oops, I didn't realize that - I'm definitely not the one to ask when it comes to computer architecture..

But thanks for the advice. I guess what I'm asking is, if she's going to be using this computer for several years to come, is the 512MB upgrade worth it?

Also, when you say routine maintainence, is there really anything else to do besides fsck, cache clean, and permission repair?

By the way, speaking of fsck, what exactly do I type once in single user mode? (I've only done it once a long time ago.) I'm asking because I've seen different ways of typing the command, such as /sbin/fsck -y, just fsck -y, and even fsck -some other letter, I think f? (Any UNIX gurus out there?)

Thanks again

Check at versiontracker.com on Macaroni, which automatically takes care of daily, weekly and monthly UNIX maintenance cron tasks. It also includes an adjustable schedule for Repair Permissions and for getting rid of foreign languages that you may not use. Respectfully, Norm

Before doing any upgrades at all, she should make sure that the slowness is not due to some software problem. She should try each of the following to see if the computer seems faster in those cases:
1) Restart in "safe mode" (hold down the Shift key after the chimes). This disables all non-essential startup software. Is the computer any faster in this mode?
2) Log out and log in as a different user (create a fresh new user account if required). Is the computer any faster as this user?

She (or you) can look at the discussion of these other threads about how to determine if you have enough RAM for what you are doing:
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=33365
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=33437

Thanks again:

Norm-
I found and looked at Macaroni, and it looks like a good, useful app that I'll tell her to try, and might even try it myself.

hayne-
I'll try (or let her know) your suggestions as soon as I can, and report back. Sometime.. :) (busy schedule)

I love Macaroni because I never have to remember to run the tasks that it diligently does without fail. Good call.

Since you said she needs to hang on to the machine for a while I'd say the RAM upgrade is a no-brainer. Over the next few years the OS and apps continue to get bigger and more RAM-hungry, not smaller...

My experience with RAM and Mac OS X:

I have a cube at home running with 768 MB. I upgraded to 1024 and everything seemed to work snappier (I tend to use a lot of apps).

Just bought a PowerBook with 512 MB. Working with it "felt" like working on the cube. I upgraded to 1,25 GB and now it "feels" like it should (much faster than my cube).

One of our customers bought an eMac with 128 MB. The machine was unusable with Mac OS X. Upgraded to 640 MB and now they can work.

So in my opinion adding RAM under X can improve speed a lot.

Yes, absolutely. From 256 to 512 or 640 is worth it for anybody on any Mac running OS X.

if she is going to be upgrading to the newer OSes when they come out then, yes that alone will be worth upgrading the ram because they are going to only get more memory hungry. I have an iBook G3/500 and it is very usable, does not compare to my dual 867 with 2 gig of ram, but still very usable. to make sure that the slow downs may not be caused from some corrupts prefs or something you could create a new user and log in as that one. also, that machine i don't think has the video card that was meeting the specs of quartz extreme so it may appear slower from that too. I bought my ibook with 384mb of ram and then later on i slapped a 512mb chip in to max it out at 640 and i did notice a difference, but only when i had several programs open or had several images open in photoshop. it was not incredibly faster, but it was noticable. 7gb of free space should be plenty, if it was getting down to less than a 1 or something like that then i would worry, but my webserver only has about 450mb free on the drive and have had zero problems with it and cannot see that it slowed it down either.

Is she complaining of it being slow, or do you think it is slow? worst case, she could backup her files and reinstall the OS, probibly does not need to be done, but wouldn't hurt either.

Granted, I'm speaking as a long-time Windoze user (Mac Mini on the way as soon as the IRS gives me my money! ;) ), but more RAM, especially if using Photoshop and manipulating large images, always helps. I've yet to read a review (granted, I'm talking about reviews from PC-oriented people such as myself) that says that going to 512MB for OS X isn't an absolute must. I'm even paying Apple the $67 to upgrade my Mini since it's actually cheaper than me buying the DIMM and doing it myself.

Another you may try, if there's the money for it, is purchasing an external HDD in either USB 2.0 (do the G3's have 2.0?) or Firewire. It may not be the same case on a Mac, but on PCs Photoshop always runs better on a separate partition from the "System" partition, and better still on a separate physical drive where it can have plenty of its own swap space. Just a thought, but as I said, it may be different on Macs, though I can't imagine why.

And a backup/format/reinstall always helps clean all the "gunk" out and get the machine running again. I reformat my main PC quarterly. I know some people, especially "low-end" users, are absolutely mortified at "losing their data", but if you can get them to realize it's mostly crap they never use in the first place and have them backup what they actually do use, it's not too big an issue.

iTunes and Word are shockingly RAM hungry.

Be prepared to be shocked and horrified.

You simply don't have to do this with a Mac.

:eek: :eek: :eek:

Well, I just reformatted an old Pismo, and it's reliable again. No Mac should have to be formatted quarterly (man, that's totally insane!) but once every few years can result in a noticeable "freshening up."

Especially if you don't reinstall all the stuff you had on it before:
- some 3rd party "enhancements" can muck up the system
- disk drives get increasingly slower as they get filled up (something like one-half speed at 80% full) - especially relevant for slow laptop drives.

absolutly!
 

My experience is that one way to speed up your Mac is with more RAM. 256 MB is not enough to run OS X and a few applications. 512 MB is the bare minimum in my opinion. I have a relatively slow 466 MHz G4, but I have 1 GB of RAM. That made a huge improvement in the speed of this machine. Keep in mind that the CPU doesn't run any faster, but if you only have 256 MB of RAM you are not getting the full performance of your machine anyway. Especially with a laptop, since the hard drive spins slower than a desktop, and when you are RAM starved you page to the hard drive a lot. I use the exact same G4 at work, but with 512 MB and my Mac was always noticeably faster. Then we added a 1 GHz upgrade card, and my mac still seems snappier in general. :)

I don't have to reformat my PC every quarter. I have the core apps that I use constantly on a "slipstream" XP disc, so it's not as painful as it sounds. I'm just a speed freak, so I reformat far more frequently than most ever would. Good to hear that Macs really just don't require it.

You could install MenuMeters, freeware/donationware from http://www.ragingmenace.com/software...ers/index.html

I have it installed - works very well on 10.3. Great to check on memory use and more. Comes up in the menu bar and is configurable via a preference pane in System Preferences.

"MenuMeters is a set of CPU, memory, disk, and network monitoring tools for MacOS X" says the readme with the app.

:)

Yes, you got it, those were exactly the reasons I chose to reformat. On the old laptop, I had installed all kinds of shareware/freeware toys over the years and never got around to removing the ones I don't care about anymore. I was sure some of them were being a drag on the CPU and affecting stability (can you say Norton Anti-Virus??). It had some trouble going to sleep and would sometime freeze up every couple weeks, which is an alarming frequency on a Mac. Also it was partitioned, some of the partitions were running out of space, and now I don't think partitioning is needed anymore.

After the reformat, it's stable as a rock in concrete. I might reformat it again...sometime near the end of the decade... :D

Upgrade OS's
 

I got my G4 shortly after OSX had just come out. Since then I always upgrade to the new OSX. When I upgraded from 10.2 to 10.3 my system ran so slow I was ready to return OSX 10.3. I backed up my hard drive and did a clean install, that solved the problem. The entire time my system only had 256mb of ram. The ram is great if you run allot of apps at once but might not be the problem. Also I-tunes is a huge resource hog.

good luck