[scabbage]

I notice that my ibook is slowing down more and more than before. When I check my memory usage, sometimes i only get 5MB/640MB free with only firefox, terminal and adium open. Firefox loads very slow. The whole machine is much slower compared to when I first got it (with only 256MB memory). Info of my ibook:

800MHz PowerPC G4
640MB Crucial DDR
Mac OS X 10.3.9

I suspect a defect of my 512MB Crucial DDR memory, which I bought on ebay (used). Is there a way to diagnose ram problems in Mac? (I know TechTool Pro can. But I don't have it.) Can anyone shed some light on this? Thanks.

[Voch]

You can try running the maintainence scripts manually from Terminal to free up some RAM. Here is an article on what it does and how it works. I run these scripts and a "repair permissions" occasionally myself.

EDIT: this is mentioned in this MacNN forum posting, too, along with some third-party programs to accomplish the same thing.

Voch

[seanc]

Have you tried repairing permissions?
There is memtest for mac, that you can run from a terminal in os x, so i'd have a look for that on google.
Take the ram out and try it, yes it will be slow but there might me a difference. e.g the bad ram may be bogging down the whole system.

Sean

[scabbage]

Thanks, guys. I'm now running the housekeeping scripts manually. I realized that these scripts (daily, weekly and monthly) are all scheduled early in the morning, during which my ibook is always sleeping. Does that mean they never get run? I'll give memtest a try after this. Thanks again.