Upgrade IMac 333 for OS X

[svdmeer]

I have an IMac 333 with 160 MB RAM (32+128)
I'd like to do some hardware upgrades. But which upgrades increase the spead of OS X most?

- I'll replace the standard 6 GB 5400 rpm Western Digital disk with a bigger one, so I can install both OS 9, OS X and Linux with many apps. Maybe I buy a 7200 rpm disk. Does a 7200 rpm disk increase the speed of OS X?

- Will upgrading to 385 MB of RAM (replacing the 32 MB module for a 256 MB one) increase the speed of OS X?
I hear many rumours about people running OS X smoothly with a slower IMac (233/266) but more RAM. My IMac runs OS X a little bit slow. Is 160 MB really not enough? (I know the rule "install as much memory as possible", but does more than 160 MB really make a big difference on a G3 333?)

What's the real big bottleneck of my machine: The lack of RAM, the lack of megaherz, of the slow harddrive?

[symphonix]

I'd suggest you do the following:
- Install OS X on your machine as it is
- Run it for a few days, doing all the sorts of things you'd usually do with it.
- Take stopwatch-timings of apps starting up and switching and jot them down. Keep the terminal running top open so you can see how much of your RAM and virtual memory is being used.
- Then, from terminal run vmstat (virtual memory statistics) to get an idea on how the system is handling virtual memory.

You'll probably find it is using a lot of RAM and VM, in which case upgrading the RAM will really improve the performance on everything but application start-up. I'd highly recommend upgrading the RAM as the processor has faster access to this.

Don't go overboard, though, as you'll never really squeeze a lot of speed out of the 333 due to a combination of processor and bus speeds. Just get enough RAM to help take the workload off the VM, and don't dig any deeper into your wallet than you need to.

[Cheryl]

yep, upgrade the RAM rather than the hard drive. You will still be working with the 333 processor.

In fact upgrade the memory to the max if you can. You have two PC66 144 pin SO-DIMM slots that can take up to 512 MB total. You will notice improvement.