IBook G4 showing its age

[Agentbolt]

Current specs on the Ibook are a 1.07 GHZ PowerPC processor, 512 MB RAM, OS X 10.4.11, mobility Radeon 9200 with 32 MB dedicated. OS X appears to run fine, but some stuff is pretty sluggish. When holding down the arrow key to scroll through a webpage for example. Or when trying to view the higher quality version of Youtube videos. It's clearly struggling to keep up.

What I'm wondering is, am I likely processor or RAM limited here? If it's the processor, then I'm obviously pretty much out of luck. If it's the RAM, I can replace the 256 MB slot the expansion currently has and throw a gig in there. I'm holding off on just doing that until I can be reasonably sure I'd see some performance increase however. Have you priced out a gig of laptop DDR ram lately? Cripes.

Any advice is appreciate, thanks.

 

[TheStu]

I'm not positive that you can drop a 1GB stick in there. I think the older G4s had a 768MB RAM cap. The PowerBook G4 12" went to a 1.25GB RAM cap with the 1GHz model, but I am not sure when or if the iBooks went to 1.25GB

 

[aphex]

You can use the tools at Crucial.com to determine how much ram it can take... http://crucial.com/

G4 1ghz shows a max of 1gb ram, pc2700, 1 slot.

 

[CrackRabbit]

Originally posted by: TheStu
I'm not positive that you can drop a 1GB stick in there. I think the older G4s had a 768MB RAM cap. The PowerBook G4 12" went to a 1.25GB RAM cap with the 1GHz model, but I am not sure when or if the iBooks went to 1.25GB

That doesn't seem right, my G3 Powerbook has a 1GB ram cap.

 

[Agentbolt]

Originally posted by: TheStu
I'm not positive that you can drop a 1GB stick in there. I think the older G4s had a 768MB RAM cap. The PowerBook G4 12" went to a 1.25GB RAM cap with the 1GHz model, but I am not sure when or if the iBooks went to 1.25GB

It'll take up to a gig in the expansion slot, along with the 256 soldiered onto the board.

Incidentally, to get back to my question, I figured out what the problem is. I'm used to PCs which, when on battery, use throttling judiciously to save power. Macs apparently just crippled the processor outright unless you choose "automatic" or "max performance" for the processor. Setting it to "automatic" while on batteries made a HUGE difference, it's fine now.

 

[MovingTarget]

I'm glad you could figure out why you were going a bit slow there. But to be honest, more ram DOES help quite a lot. The first thing I did when I got mine was to stick in an extra 512 stick that I had lying around. OSX will use whatever you can give it for the most part. Even on a fresh install with it on best performance/power adapter, you will notice the difference.

Too bad they still don't have a 12" offering for the new notebook lines.

 

[Agentbolt]

Thanks moving target. I'm sure I'll throw some more in if/when I ever decide to bump it up to 10.5 Currently I just can't stomach paying 50 bucks for a gig of DDR RAM, that's all. It's ridiculous, TWO gigs of DDR2 might run you 35 bucks nowadays.

 

[Chadder007]

I wish there was an alternative to Adobe Flash Player that wasn't so hard on CPU's. It seems to be causing a lot of system bog downs on Laptops/PCs that people are asking me about.