Powerbook upgrades
I’m still fairly happy with my 20-month-old Powerbook G4 550, and I’m not ready to buy a new computer yet, but this one’s going to need something soon, or it’s going to grind to a halt. I actually ran out of disk space this afternoon; I’m still not sure what ate up the last gig, but I was able to shift another couple gigs onto a spare firewire drive. I have about 12 GB of stuff that I can delete once I’ve had time to archive it at home (about 6 GB of unsorted digital camera pics, 5 GB of iPhoto database, and a bit of other stuff), but after that I’m going to be out of space. At the current rate, I’m going to need to swap my current 40 GB drive for a 60-80 GB model in the spring.
It’s RAM that’s really killing me, though. Panther’s activity monitor tells me that I’m frequently down under 10 MB of free RAM, out of 512, and it really feels like it. I’ve taken to killing Safari off on a regular basis, it tends to grow up to 90 MB or so, and killing Mail and NetNewsWire off once or twice per day. That mostly keeps things in check, but firing up iTunes or iCal causes the box to start swapping again. I’ve ground to a complete stop a couple times this week, waiting for the laptop to respond and let me kill off a couple apps.
So, it looks like I’m going to be DIMM shopping soon. From what I can tell, transintl is cheapest this week; they only want $99 per DIMM, while Crucial wants $140.
I have a TiBook 400. I just went whole hog and upgraded to 60 gig 7200 HD, 1 gig memory and a superdrive. I have a TiBook that I’ll probably keep another 2 years so 4.5 total years won’t be so bad. I’d say that’s a great investment.
Yeah, that’s one of the things I like about the newer powerbooks–Apple has actually designed them to be user upgradable. My 550’s manual tells you how to swap out the hard drive. Most of the PC laptops that I’ve dealt with (admittedly not a whole lot of them) aren’t really designed for hard drive or optical drive upgrades.
Still, I’m starting to wish that this thing was faster. NetNewsWire, particularly, is pretty slow when it’s updating. I don’t know how much of that is CPU slowness, and I assume that it’ll speed up over time as Ranchero optimizes thing.