Powerbook RAM upgrade for Tiger

[Miss_Lateralus]

Hey people,

I've been browsing this site for a couple of days now and I know that upgrading my RAM will be a good place to start in terms of speeding up my powerbook.

At the moment it has 512Mb of RAM, G4 1.5Ghz CPU and an 80Gb HD as well as the usual powerbook spec.

Here are my questions:

1. I know Tiger is a 64 bit OS - Will this mean that it will run slower on my machine compared to Panther as its a more hefty operating system? Or will there be no difference in speed?

2. How much of a performance boost will I see if I upgrade one slot to 1gig and occupy the other slot with 256mb (left over from the 512)? Any examples please.

Thanks

 

[Zammy-Sam]

Hi Miss_Lateralus and welcome to the forum.
1. Tiger actually supports 32bit and 64bit and since there is no obvious benefit for 64bit operating systems, it doesn't matter if you have a 32bit or 64bit system. The currently biggest benefit of a 64bit system lies on the support for more ram. However, tiger seems to be faster than panther and causes a higher speed bump on G4 macs than on G5s. So, you should expect a slight speed bump when you install tiger.
2. The more ram your system has, the more programs you can run simultaneously and the longer you can keep your system up without facing lots of swappings to the hard disk. On the startup you surely won't see any difference between a 512mb system or a 1gb one. After few hours you will find the system with 512 start with heavy disk load while the 1gb system feels as fast as it was freshly rebooted.

 

[Miss_Lateralus]

Many thanks for the response Zammy-Sam

I've just bought 1gb stick of Corsair memory for my powerbook, and I'm getting tiger next week.