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iownacube · Jan 28, 2005, 03:01 AM

hey everyone,

i just bought a powerbook 15" 1.33, its bone stock right now with 256 mb ram and 60 gb 4200 rpm drive...

i'm just not blown away by the performance...maybe i was expecting too much since i was coming from a 450 mhz cube. although for the most part it does feel more responsive, things like clicking on a menu item and seeing a lag before the menu opens is annoying...also, it seems like safari actually opens slower than on my cube! iphoto definitely feels slower than on my cube, but that's probably because the cube has an 80gb 7200 rpm drive.

so i'm seeking advice for the best upgrade to give me the most subjective performance increase (i do basic stuff) - should it be pushing the ram up or going to a 5400 or 7200 rpm hard drive? i can only afford to do, since this laptop has maxxed me out for a while.

thanks for your help!

Randman · Jan 28, 2005, 03:03 AM

Get more ram. That alone should help considerably. For drive upgrades, there's been plenty of threads on this already.

You may also want to consider doing a clean install. I've always found the OS a bit laggy when it comes direct from Apple.

alphasubzero949 · Jan 28, 2005, 04:46 AM

Panther runs pokey on 256 MB of RAM. Consider at least 512 MB, but the more the merrier.

zzarg · Jan 28, 2005, 07:09 AM

RAM, RAM and more RAM !

I got my stock 12" PowerBook and it was kinda okay (128MB)
Then I added 512MB and realised what it should have been from the factory.
Recently as I was doing a bit more intense stuff and getting a lot of page faults (thanks Activity Monitor !) I swapped the 512MB for a 1GB stick and I've been really happy.

I don't think I'd consider a new Mac of any flavour without at least 1.5GB RAM... it's not expensive (well, if you shop around it's not expensive !), and it really makes a difference

iownacube · Jan 28, 2005, 12:00 PM

so it appears the concensus is that i should up my memory as much as i can afford - and that this will help the most with the responsiveness with the system? even more so than a faster hard drive?

great! thanks for the input and here's to hoping i never scratch this beautiful machine. =)

GSixZero · Jan 28, 2005, 12:15 PM

Yes. Ram is by far the easiest, and the best bang for your buck.

jpg71 · Jan 28, 2005, 12:35 PM

Definitely. You went from 768MB on your cube to 256MB on the pb - no wonder you feel things are sluggish.

Memory is king - load up on it!

wuzup101 · Jan 28, 2005, 01:50 PM

An upgrade to a faster hard drive would also help things, but ram is much easier to install and 256 is just plain unacceptable. I would go for an extra gig stick of ram now if you can afford it ($200 from newegg.com or $160 from outpost I believe). In the future you can also consider upgrading to either an 80/100gig 5400rpm drive, or 60/100gig 7200rpm drive. The 100gb 7200rpm drives aren't out yet... but they should be out any day now. For general usage ram is king... but for things like iPhoto, iTunes, etc... where you have to open large amouts of files... or large files... the extra hdd speed is also nice to have.

Now, I have to get off my roomates shitty Dell... can't wait until my powerbook returns from service

cambro · Jan 28, 2005, 02:55 PM

Originally posted by wuzup101:
An upgrade to a faster hard drive would also help things

Bingo. Here's your main problem. The hard drive in your cube is much faster. Launching applications and stuff like that is 99% hard drive speed.

I'm pretty sure that if you could double hard drive performance, it would result in MUCH greater overall system performance than doubling processor speed or RAM.

anamexis · Jan 28, 2005, 03:30 PM

Originally posted by cambro:
Bingo. Here's your main problem. The hard drive in your cube is much faster. Launching applications and stuff like that is 99% hard drive speed.

I'm pretty sure that if you could double hard drive performance, it would result in MUCH greater overall system performance than doubling processor speed or RAM.

No, RAM is most definitely the biggest bottleneck in the system, especially with what he is talking about (responsiveness). Hard drive speed may help a bit, but not nearly as much as RAM. And you are wrong, there is TONs of RAM activity when you open an application as RAM is allocated to it. In fact, hard drive speed shouldn't be too much of a problem until you get to heavy-duty multimedia work.

By all means, go for RAM!

iREZ · Jan 28, 2005, 04:05 PM

RAM first
HD second

My order for more responsiveness.

Mafia · Jan 28, 2005, 05:57 PM

Originally posted by zzarg:
RAM, RAM and more RAM !

tooki · Jan 28, 2005, 08:55 PM

Originally posted by cambro:
Bingo. Here's your main problem. The hard drive in your cube is much faster. Launching applications and stuff like that is 99% hard drive speed.

I'm pretty sure that if you could double hard drive performance, it would result in MUCH greater overall system performance than doubling processor speed or RAM.

Absolutely wrong. No hard disk in the world is anywhere close to as fast as RAM. RAM is over a thousand times faster than the hard disk. Insufficient RAM means that things that should be in RAM must be put on disk, and are thus being accessed a thousand times slower.

At 256MB, Mac OS X is swapping VERY heavily to disk, and will benefit MASSIVELY from increasing the RAM to beyond 512MB.

tooki

iownacube · Jan 29, 2005, 01:24 AM

thanks for all the replies guys! i think i'll upgrade the ram first and save for the hard drive second, since those will go down with time...any other tips to make the most of this computer???

siflippant · Jan 29, 2005, 02:59 AM

Originally posted by iREZ:
RAM first
HD second

My order for more responsiveness.

cambro · Jan 29, 2005, 08:38 AM

You guys are right that RAM is important, but look at what the original poster was talking about in terms of performance. I don't care if the laptop had 100 GIGS of RAM, the launch time of an application (especially for the first time) is all about hard drive speed.

When clicking on a menu, these things have to be read from the disk, built, and put into memory. The first time you click on these, how fast a menu appears is all about hard drive speed.

Opening iPhoto? Scrolling through photos? Unless you have many GIGS of RAM or a tiny little iPhoto library, the disk is going to be working. Period. The faster your hard drive, the better your performance is going to be.

Obiviously I AGREE. RAM is important and it WILL definitely make your machine faster. Can't have too much of it. But the original poster listed things that would get better faster with 4200 -> 7200 hard drive.

That said...it would be easier and probably cheaper to throw in another stick of RAM and you'll definitely get the return for your investment.

Detrius · 01:55 PM

Originally posted by cambro:
You guys are right that RAM is important, but look at what the original poster was talking about in terms of performance. I don't care if the laptop had 100 GIGS of RAM, the launch time of an application (especially for the first time) is all about hard drive speed.

When clicking on a menu, these things have to be read from the disk, built, and put into memory. The first time you click on these, how fast a menu appears is all about hard drive speed.

Opening iPhoto? Scrolling through photos? Unless you have many GIGS of RAM or a tiny little iPhoto library, the disk is going to be working. Period. The faster your hard drive, the better your performance is going to be.

Obiviously I AGREE. RAM is important and it WILL definitely make your machine faster. Can't have too much of it. But the original poster listed things that would get better faster with 4200 -> 7200 hard drive.

That said...it would be easier and probably cheaper to throw in another stick of RAM and you'll definitely get the return for your investment.

We aren't claiming that the hard drive isn't important. We're claiming that it isn't as important as RAM. Here's the problem with your example of clicking on the menu:

With enough RAM:
user clicks on menu
software sees that this piece of information is on the hard drive and not in RAM.
software fetches menu from hard drive.
software renders and displays the menu.
-1 hard drive access

Without enough RAM:
user clicks on menu
software sees that this piece of information is on the hard drive and not in RAM.
software sees that there isn't enough RAM to store this information.
software goes through all pages in RAM and figures out what has not been used recently.
software puts these pages of RAM in the swap file on the hard drive.
software fetches menu from hard drive.
software sees that the code to render the menu is on the hard drive and not in RAM.
software goes through all pages in RAM and figures out what has not been used recently.
software puts these pages of RAM in the swap file on the hard drive.
software fetches code to render the menu and places it in RAM.
software renders and displays the menu.
-4 hard drive accesses

The bottom line: if you don't have enough RAM, you are doing significantly MORE hard drive transactions than if you did have enough RAM. A faster hard drive will speed up these drive transactions, but more RAM will eliminate the need for the drive transactions. More RAM means this information only needs to be read once slowly, vs. many times only twice as fast as slowly.

There is a term called "thrashing." Did you see the demo that Steve Jobs did when he introduced the G5? He wanted to show off a program that could use more than 4GB of RAM and compare it to a PC that couldn't use more than 4GB of RAM. They didn't do a shootout between the Mac and the PC because they said they couldn't find an example that didn't leave the PC thrashing for a week. If you don't have enough RAM, your machine goes crazy accessing the hard drive. Thrashing is when the computer is too busy paging out virtual memory to ever stop accessing the hard drive.

File copies will not be affected by more RAM. Most everything else will. 256MB of RAM is not enough.

cambro · Jan 30, 2005, 10:04 AM

Originally posted by Detrius:
256MB of RAM is not enough.

Agreed. Your post is right on.

But, I still maintain that hard disk speed is typically a MAJOR bottleneck on most portables for most users and that significant performance gains in the area the poster mentioned will be realized with an upgrade to the hdd. He's talking about normal, day to day usage here. NOT trailblazing demo Apps that chunk 4 Gigs of RAM. Search the forums. There are people that have posted great increases in performance after upgrading the hdd on a PB.

Moreover, when someone is asking about advice when purchasing a powerbook, they are MUCH better off upgrading the HDD from Apple right off the bat and THEN popping in extra RAM themselves later when they can afford it.

Detrius · Jan 30, 2005, 11:01 AM

One piece of information we are missing is how much RAM the Cube had.

Otherwise, the only way to know which would give a better speed boost is to run actual benchmarks. I don't think many of us are in a position to do this kind of benchmark. I know I'm not.

There are many factors to perceived computer speed. I maintain that the CPU, RAM, and GPU make the biggest differences in 10.2 and later. The hard drive does make a big difference, but you aren't going to see the same degree of differences as you will with the other three. A lack of RAM will make tasks more hard drive intensive than they need to be.

SEkker · Jan 30, 2005, 12:04 PM

A faster hard drive will not make an os x system with 256 (or less) MB RAM feel faster. RAM is what's needed.

A faster hard drive WILL make a system with lots of RAM seem snappier.

In my hands, I usually look to go to at least 512MB RAM (I prefer 1 GB, but then I do photoshop and some video work on my machines, 2 GB is even better), then I start considering hard drive upgrade options. For notebooks, going to a modern 5400 rpm drive is the sweet spot in terms of cost/speed boost. And the 100 GB 5400 rpm model from Seagate is a nice piece of hardware.

Superchicken · Jan 30, 2005, 12:35 PM

Actually a faster HD with less RAM would make it feel faster than the same comp with less RAM and a slower HD. This would actually probably be more noticeable I imagine than having new RAM and then a new HD. That said, it's stupid to not get more RAM first unless you do it within like a few days of each-other. But yah, get more RAM then later get a 7200rpm

madmacgames · Jan 30, 2005, 01:51 PM

Originally posted by Randman:
You may also want to consider doing a clean install. I've always found the OS a bit laggy when it comes direct from Apple.

Not to mention the cloning process is a bit of black magic and sometimes a few things end up a little quirky in OS. The first time I got my Mac I did not wipe the drive and do a clean install, and ended up having to do a clean install a couple weeks later because of some random weirdness in the OS.

javadesigner · Jan 30, 2005, 11:53 PM

You guys are right that RAM is important, but look at what the original poster was talking about in terms of performance. I don't care if the laptop had 100 GIGS of RAM, the launch time of an application (especially for the first time) is all about hard drive speed.

Unix file systems (including all the OS X one's)
use memory mapping and caching. Means if there's
enough RAM, then the first time something is read
from disk, there will be a slight delay. The second
time, those contents will be read directly from
RAM and will be instant.

Launching an application (once and first time only) is
a rare event. People have 6-8 oft used apps that they
launch. After that, no matter how many times you
quit those apps and re-launch them, access will
be instantaneous if you have enough RAM (and those
pages have not been swapped out to disk).

If you have 100 Gigs of RAM, every single byte
of your hard disk will live in RAM and will be
accessed instantaneously (a thousand times faster
than re-reading it from disk).

ndtechie05 · Jan 31, 2005, 08:35 AM

if you just bought it brand new, you may be able to get the new one from apple they just released

jpg71 · Jan 31, 2005, 10:44 AM

Originally posted by Detrius:
One piece of information we are missing is how much RAM the Cube had.

Based on the OP's previous messages, I presumed that the Cube he used as comparison was the one he was selling which had 768MB of memory.

Going from 768MB to 256MB in OS X is torture. All good points in this thread though - RAM and fast HDD are both useful in improving performance, but in this case - things like "clicking on a menu item and seeing a lag before the menu opens is annoying..." is definitely improved with more RAM.

As for "safari actually opens slower than on my cube! iphoto definitely feels slower than on my cube, but that's probably because the cube has an 80gb 7200 rpm drive...", yes - the faster drive has something to do with that, but in my experience with my AlBook 15 and my Cube, Safari opens up in about the same amount of time on either (1GB on the AlBook and 1.5GB on the Cube).