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joe_farley · Dec 24, 2005, 01:44 PM

Hi, ive recently got an apple ibook G4 and ive got about 14.21 GB of memory left as i have loads of music on my itunes and movies saved. the memory seems to run down quickly and i was worried what to do when it all runs out. is there any memory upgrades you can get ( i can imagine them being quite expensive) thanks for the halp and happy christmas.

harrisjamieh · Dec 24, 2005, 01:49 PM

a replacement, larger hard disk is one solution, but it is very difficult to install yourself, and would voiid your warrenty. The best solution would be to get an external hard drive, which would allow you to do two things (so long as it is a firewire hard drive) 1) it will give you more space (up to about 500 GB if you want) 2) you could tellyour laptop that the external hard disk is your main hard disk, and so the laptop will run off of this hard drive, which would give you a speed boost due to the slow speed of laptop drives / fast speed of (most) external drives. Hope you can follow all that ! happy Christmas!

joe_farley · Dec 24, 2005, 02:09 PM

cheers for the help

ghporter · Dec 24, 2005, 04:43 PM

Just a note on terminology here: the term "memory" is usually used to refer to Random Access Memory, while hard drives are referred to as, well, hard drives. It can confuse people if you use a term that almost universally means something else-it sure confused me.

While it's no big deal (obviously you got your point across in the post), it helps to be more in step with everyone else's vocabulary.

psk-ele · Dec 25, 2005, 01:32 AM

In reply to what happens when your HD gets too full...

In general, for Mac OSX, you should leave roughly 10% of your HD free for proper operation of the hot-file system used by apple's HFS+. This allows for proper operation of the virtual memory and file swapping. When your HD goes beyond this, the computer is going to be spending a lot of time trying to find space to write files to, and could over-write files on your HD or in the worst case, just sorta stop working.

also, the less free space, the more the HD will end up fragmenting files across the disk in any open spot it can find when its trying to write (say a movie or song). This will increase access time and slow down the computer.

Ok, yeah....that's all I got.....

cmeisenzahl · Dec 25, 2005, 08:01 AM

Agree w/ what's been said so far. I would recommend a USB 2 or Firewire external drive. Not too expensive and very handy. I also recommend keeping at least a few GB free on each drive at all times.

Chris

harrisjamieh · Dec 25, 2005, 03:40 PM

I WOULDNT recommend a USB 2 external drive - firewire has many benefits over USB 2 - bootable, faster (dont argue USB2 is faster, cause' in the real world it aint), and firewire has its own bus, so does not slow the computer down by having the drive plugged in

tooki · Dec 25, 2005, 07:26 PM

Originally Posted by harrisjamieh

...and firewire has its own bus, so does not slow the computer down by having the drive plugged in

What on earth are you talking about?

tooki

mduell · Dec 25, 2005, 09:53 PM

I think he means that Firewire requires a more powerful controller chip, so that it doesn't have to use the CPU like USB does.

tooki · Dec 25, 2005, 11:56 PM

That's not true. Differences in CPU load have far more to do with driver implementation than anything else. (That's why on Macs, FW uses less CPU, while on Windows, USB uses less CPU.)

tooki

harrisjamieh · Dec 26, 2005, 04:26 AM

o well, twas xmas day, maybe a bit too drunk to be posting fairly technical stuff hehe

mduell · Dec 26, 2005, 04:57 AM

Originally Posted by tooki

That's not true. Differences in CPU load have far more to do with driver implementation than anything else. (That's why on Macs, FW uses less CPU, while on Windows, USB uses less CPU.)

Thanks tooki; I was skeptical so I STFW and found confirmation.

ghporter · Dec 26, 2005, 08:30 AM

...first time I've seen a formal usage of STFW... Thanks!

Chipsets' APIs are very much standards driven, but drivers are programmers' beasts, and what's important to one is not as important to another. It makes sense that Apple's implementation of IEEE1394 would be friendlier on the computer, and also that they would be less helpful with "the other standard." Too bad we can't get both interfaces to be CPU conservative...