[SirCastor]

*So I posted this in the PowerBook forum, but so far no one there has offered any thoughts. I was hoping you desktop people (My own kind) would be a bit more fourthcoming. Thanks ahead of time*

Approaching this forum with these questions may be getting myself biased answers, but I'll shoot them off anyway.

A friend of mine is taking off for the next year and a half and she's leaving her 12" 867mhz PowerBook in my care. I wasn't about to argue the point and am excited to have a laptop at my disposal. I needed a router and in anticipation of this event, I bought a wireless router. But here is my stumbling block:

My current machine is an old 400mhz G4 Sawtooth. I've upgraded it a bit over the past few years, but it still has two more things needed: A faster processor (at the cost of $250) and OS X 10.4
With the PowerBook coming, I have things that I would like to do with it as well. First all, the PowerBook will need an Airport card (it supports AirPort Extreme and I can get the card new from Apple for $70 because I'm a student.) and it needs more RAM.

What should I do first? Bump the speed on my Desktop? Get the wireless card in the PowerBook? Get RAM for either?

Actually, that reminds me, what is the max ram of the 12 AlBook? The new ones have a noted max of 1.25GB, the one I'm getting says a max of 640. I'm assuming that the older one is taking the 128 onboard and the possible 512 in the slot, but I didn't want to go out and buy a Gigabyte of RAM if the system can only address half of that. Does that make sense?

So I'm looking for some suggestions on that. My friend of course, has no problem with my making her laptop a better little machine while she's gone. (And I'm not expecting any kind of compensation from her upon it's return.)
Thanks for your help.

Oh, one last thing. Is there a way to sync Address Books and iCals without .mac?

[Todd Madson]

You could just save your money and not bother upgrading the G4/400 and use it as a
file server for the remainder of the machines in your home network to use.

Then, when you're using your friends portable you can save money and just put it
into an account and when she returns, use the money to buy what you want. You
might even consider selling the G4/400.

[SirCastor]

Well, the 400 needs to last me for an additional couple of years. I've mostly made the decision that I'm not going to buy another machine until the intel PowerBooks show up. That's still quite a ways away. And even at that, I'm not sure I want a first generation machine. I do video work, and the power of this machine certainly tells it's age.
The PowerBook I'm going to use for school, and the G4 will remain for video work. (and, if I can ever afford it, World of Warcraft)

I certainly do appreciate your thoughts though. Using the G4 as a server is something I hadn't considered. You certainly have a better financial mind regarding the future than I do.

[sailor]

You have already gotten some responsible advice...wrt the money....never hurts to save $$
that aside, as I have an almost identical config (my sawtooth started at 350Mhz and has 86xMb of memory), and a PB12 with 256Mb of RAM, I'll offer my advice:
1) get the wireless card for the PB - that baby is designed for portability and you'll enjoy using it ANYWHERE in your living space
2)upgrade the Sawtooth CPU - I bumped mine from 350 to 1G and Tiger is really responsive (I don't do any compute-intensive stuff, but like Spotlight to be fast)
3) upgrade the RAM on whichever machine you use the most....OSX uses it well, resulting in immediate speed improvements

My next move will probably be a better graphics card, then RAM for the PB...wanna keep this stuff going for another 12mos or so....

Enjoy the laptop life!!

[mousehouse]

I would argue against spreading your obviously thin funds across several machines. You might want to consider selling the Sawtooth and using those funds to buy an external Firewire drive. This alone will improve the speed of the powerbook when doing disk intensive stuff. If you have an emotional attachment to the machine you could put it to use as a fileserver.

Airport is quite usefull, although if you don't strictly need it (which you apparantly don't, you now have a desktop) I'd get memory for the powerbook first. The first 12" powerbooks had an official 640 (128+512) limit but if I remember correctly worked fine with a 1GB DIMM. Do a search on the powerbook forum or see xlr8yourmac.com, you'll probably find good info there.

It's nice having several machines available but you can only work on one. Just get one of them up to recent specs. Besides, you friend might even buy back the additional memory if you want.