Chosen Solution
I recently upgraded the extra RAM DIMM in my 800 MHz iBook G4 from 512mb to 1gb. I’d been hoping for a big performance bump, but I haven’t really noticed much of a difference. I’m just curious if anyone has had a similar situation and if there might be something I’m failing to do to take full advantage of the additional memory. The memory does show up in the System Profiler (128mb built-in plus the 1 GB DIMM). I’m currently getting a 22.04 Xbench score. I tested before I upgraded the memory, but unfortunately didn’t save those results. But I’m vaguely remembering a score of 19 or 20 with the 512mb DIMM.
The best performance gain to be had in an iBook is to replace the harddrive - Apple Shipped iBooks with 4200 RPM Drives! slap a 7200 RPM drive in, night and day.
You didn’t mention what OS you have on this machine, but I wanted to mention that there is a huge difference between the performance of Tiger 10.4 vs Leopard 10.5 on a machine of this speed. Tiger does not require the same resources as Leopard, so if you have Leopard installed, you may want to downgrade to Tiger, and you may get at least part of the speed increase you’re looking for. Besides that, unfortunately this is an old and relatively slow laptop that isn’t getting any faster, so you may want to consider upgrading to a used MacBook in the $500 range, which will be a night and day difference in terms of performance.
For what it’s worth, I upgraded RAM in a PowerBook G4 12" 1.5ghz (I think it was 1.5ghz) to 1.25GB when I upgraded to Leopard. I didn’t notice much of a performance difference either, anecdotally. I agree with rdklincorporated’s advice
1GB still isn’t that much, I myself only have 1 gig on my MB, and that can barely do anything. Added to the rather slow processor you have, I wouldn’t expect much.
