I have a five year old 15" PowerBook G4. This is the Aluminum, 1.5 GHz model with two RAM slots. Max RAM is 2 GB. It came with 512 MB which I upgraded to 1.5 GB when I bought it by adding a 1 GB DDR DIMM. The computer is running the most recent OS it supports, OSX 10.5.8. To max out the RAM, I would need to remove the original 512 MB DIMM and replace it with a 1 GB. I can buy a 1GB PC2700 DDR SODIMM for $50 new or $25 on Craig’s List.
The computer is sluggish – Word 2008 runs slowly and Safari skips many frames on YouTube videos. Watching video on Hulu is even worse. I would call it just barely useable. Would there be a noticeable performance increase after increasing the RAM?
This. You’re just not going to get performance from that machine. I’ve got a 4-year-old first-gen Macbook with two gigs of RAM, and Hulu doesn’t run that well on it. Of course, I’m running an external monitor at 1920x1080, but the point stands. You’ll get some improvement if you go up to two gigs, so if that’s all you can afford to do, then go for it - but you’d be happier with a new laptop, and you old machine retired to server duty or a coffee-table machine.
And don’t buy RAM on Craigslist - you can’t tell if it’s bad until you’ve installed it, after all. Buy new.
Mac performance scales more linearly with memory than Windows’ does because of peculiarities in how the systems use it, but even given that, I doubt that the addition of a mere half gig would be noticeable to lightweight apps like web video and word processing.
If you can’t afford to upgrade the machine to something modern, you’d probably get a greater speed improvement from replacing the hard drive with an SSD than increasing memory, albeit at higher than $50 cost.
Memory is not likely your primary bottleneck. I don’t have Mac experience, so forgive me if I make any untoward generalizations. But I used to own a Toshiba laptop with a Celeron processor. All the memory in the world would not have made it perform better because the processor was holding it back.
IMO 1.5 gigs is sufficient for Hulu, if the rest of your computer isn’t sorely outdated. I’ve known many people who play computer games with moderate graphics with only 2.
1.5ghz should be plenty fast for most mundane tasks like MS Office, surfing, etc. Intel’s Atom based systems top out at 1.8ghz I think. And if you check the specs on most netbooks, they’re generally in the same neighborhood.
I think you will see improved performance but I wouldn’t expect it to be dramatically different. On the other hand, you would be boosting the amount of dram by 33%, and that is pretty significant.
So I can’t say how much better the system will be but I fairly sure that its performance will improve noticeably - just not maybe as noticeably as you would like.
edit - it should of course be noted that the number of instructions per cycle (IPS) done by new chips is higher than older chips, so it’s not really fair to compare just the overall clockspeed as I’ve done here.
To find out if more RAM will help, first find out how much you’re currently using. If you’re using more than 1.5 GB but less than 2 GB then more RAM will help a lot. If you’re using over 2 GB then more RAM will help, but not as much.
I’m now checking Activity Monitor, which shows system memory usage. In typical use, it looks like I have over 600 MB free and another 100 MB inactive with zero swaps. So, memory is clearly not limiting.
I don’t see any point in investing even $50 in this system. Once finances permit, I’ll be buying a new laptop.
What is total memory? 2 gig? If it’s more, then it is including virtual memory in its calculations and since virtual memory resides on the hard drive, that really doesn’t tell you anything.
If it’s not including virtual memory and your system does in fact have more than a third of available dram free, but yet the system is still painfully slow, that just doesn’t sound right.
I don’t know anything about macs but I was under the impression that for it’s time, the G4 was quite a fast chip. It’s hard for me to understand how a machine like that would struggle with web pages when a $300 netbook with a sub-2ghz processor does not.
Total memory is 1.5 GB, which is the sum of Free, Wired, Active, and Inactive. I’m running a few more applications now. Free memory is down to about 350 MB with 15.5 MB of page swaps. Still not a real limitation.
I’ve been doing some reading about this. My understanding is that the PowerPC chip was reasonably fast five years ago. However, Intel architecture processors were evolving faster which is why Apple decided to switch.
Because of the switch, focus is now on optimizing software for Intel processors. So, while software will run on PowerPC systems, it doesn’t run fast. Apple doesn’t even support PowerPC on the newest OSX.
Those $300 netbooks use a modern processor with an optimized OS and applications. I’m not sure how useable a netbook would be if it had a five year old processor, even with the same clock rate.
Would you consider downgrading the OS back down to Tiger (10.4.x)?
I am not sure if there’s anything special you need Leopard for, but I have a 4+ year old Core Solo mac mini with 1 GB of RAM. It had been running Leopard, but slow enough to be irritating. After a recent hard drive failure, I used the opportunity to reinstall Tiger and have since been quite pleased with the results. It runs MUCH faster and I don’t have a problem with Hulu or youtube anymore.
My older computer is an HP Pavilion which I bought nearly four years ago, and it came with .5G RAM. Upgrading the RAM first to 1.0G, and then 2.0G helped performance immensely; the bottleneck on that machine is no longer memory, but HDD space.
Memory may not be the biggest bottleneck in the OP’s situation, but I have to think it’s one of them. 1.5G isn’t much when you think of what Internet sites want to push onto your machine.