[Seneca]

Planning on putting 10.4 on my iMac G3 500Mhz machine and I was wondering if there's any significant difference between putting 512 megs of memory or maxxing it out at 1GB? I know "more's usually better" but lets be cost-conscious too here Thanks.

[SLiMeX]

I have an iMac DV SE 500mHz machine, running 10.4.6 and the RAM is maxed out at 640mB.

[Seneca]

Odd, that machine is supposed to max out at 1GB of ram?

[JKT]

Don't know what SLiMeX is on about either - 1GB RAM is the max for any slot loading iMacs (it might even be 2GB if there were any 1GB single chips that fit, but that would be expensive!!).

glassvial - whatever Mac you install OS X on, 1GB RAM is always going to be better. On an older Mac like that, you are going to have slower performance just on the basis of the CPU, so why make it more painful by hobbling the OS/apps with limited RAM (especially as you will have a relatively slow hard drive too if it is the original, where paging will also be more of an issue than normal). FWIW, 768MB (a 512MB and 256MB RAM) would be the sweet spot between performance versus cost, though if you can get 1GB, get 1GB.

[Seneca]

500Mhz slow? Hell, I'm replacing a 233 machine with this 500Mhz machine so this'll be a major upgrade

The purpose of the machine is mainly just web surfing and word processing, no music downloading, no DVD playing, no CD burning, etc.

I'm not sure how fast the hard drive speed is offhand, but if I had the money to I'd like to get a 7200RPM drive in it as well (but probably not).

[JKT]

Hey, I said slower not slow

10.4 runs pretty well on my old 400MHz iMac DV (though it does have 1GB RAM and a 7200rpm drive in it)... no speed demon, obviously, but not horribly, horribly slow either!

In terms of boosting the "speed", I would say RAM is more important than HD speed. For what you plan to use it for, 512MB may be OK. You can always get one chip now and decide on a second later if you find that you need it.