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Staiolz · Dec 7, 2004, 11:42 PM

hi, I have a Ti 1ghz PB, 512 megs of ram, 60gb, I've yet to upgrade it. My computer for a while has been running pretty hot by feeling.. though with temperature monitor it says its only 104.0, I'm guessing this isn't to high for PB's.. What I have noticed is, that i will start to lag a bit after opening programs.. and even after closing them, I got turbo mem to help me out with that and defrag ram once in a while, but I didn't want to rely on a program. My friend who has a 12 inch pb with 1.3ghz has no problems like this what so ever, and when using his computer, his is much faster. Does 300 mhz make that much of a difference? he also has 512 megs of ram. .. Could it have anything to do with my battery?.. Should I upgrade ram or faster hd? If I could get any help, that would be appreciated, thanks.

I'd like to keep my PB for another 2 years, but with the lagging.. I don't know if I'll be able to do that.. I run Ableton Live, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Reason. All of these are very processor heavy, I know, but like I said, my friend who has a PB also runs these programs and his is noticably faster.

iREZ · Dec 8, 2004, 01:44 PM

Uping the HD to a faster one (5400 min. but 7200 preferred) should help you out with some hangups. Also more RAM will be real beneficial for you. I have a Rev B 12" and notice none of what you mentioned while running PS. You still have a very capable PB, see if any of these things help it out.

Master Yoda · Dec 8, 2004, 07:13 PM

Like iRez says, upgrade the hard drive. My 5400 gave my 500Mhz TiBook a extra 2 years. As did 10.3. (10.2 was waaayyy slow).

More ram obviously too, especially for PhotoShop. Throw as much as you can in there. Sometimes, utilities such as Cocktail can clean up the system and speed things up, as does a clean install of OS X.

slugslugslug · Jan 2, 2005, 01:23 PM

I'm in a position similar to Staiolz's, though my TiBook's got 1 Gb of RAM already. But I'd like to hold onto it quite a bit longer before a new Mac gets to tempting, and I'll probably swap the 60 Gb/4200 rpm drive out for a faster 100 (or maybe 120, if they're out soon) Gb drive later this year.

The other thing is RAM, though: since Tis use SDRAM, which currently maxes out at 512 Mb per SO-DIMM, I can't up my RAM today.

So, my actual question: will I be able to up it in the future? Or has new R&D on SDRAM ceased? Seems like the industry is pretty much switched over to DDR, so I wouldn't be surpirsed if capacity of SDR stops increasing. Does anyone have any better-informed insight?

Thanks. y.

Halfloaf · Jan 2, 2005, 02:23 PM

slugslug: I think the PC133 SODIMM RAM modules have stopped development as I think new DDR RAM is the way things are going in current notebooks.

I'm going to upgarde to 768 soon, (Can't afford 1Gig) from 512mb. I mainly use my Tibook for surfing, mail and some architecture apps (SketchUP, Vectorworsk and ArchiCAD) . I've noticed some pageouts when I have more than 3 apps open so I think another 256 MB will help out till I can pop another 512mb DIMM in and replace the slow 4200 rpm drive. Don't use PS much anyways.

-HL

iREZ · Jan 2, 2005, 07:27 PM

You should chuck your 256MB chips up on ebay and see how much they fetch ya. Maybe you can afford two 512MB chips.

urrl78 · Jan 2, 2005, 07:41 PM

Since you are capable of optimizing the hard drive with diskwarrior optimizer I would suggest that possibility. You spoke of defragging RAM but I'm not sure how you did that. Even my 1.5 Ghz began acting sluggish as far as opening files go; I would get the rainbow wheel, even after defragging with techtool pro. Only after I took the advice of a poster and zapped the PRAM about 5 consecutive times did my Powerbook revert back to it's old self.

And yes, I know Macs defrag themselves but only to 20 MB file size max. I use defrag software for my HD since I deal with video files 8 Gig or greater. I think upgrading to a quicker HD is an idea, but if you want to save money I would exhaust the software possibilities first; repair permissions, onyx, etc.

One last tip; I have heard that having less that 20% of free space on your hard drive can slow it down drastically, so if that is your case I would try to free up some space first. You problem could be just that simple.