So my wife was complaining about the 1.42GHz G4 iBook she got a couple years ago from Apple in replacement of her faulty 800MHz G3 iBook. The reason? Since I upgraded the machine to Leopard, when she was using apps like Firefox, Safari and such, the HD would make lots of access noise most of the time. Not that the computer was too slow to use, but it made lots of HDD noise.

Hmm, Safari? Firefox? Applications that do a lot of on-disk caching (especially Firefox, which is so disk intensive you’d better upgrade to a 7200RPM drive rather than to a new CPU)… The drive in her machine is a 5200RPM 80GB unit, so it’s not blazing fast, but it’s OK. And then I had an intuition: I opened “About this Mac” and checked the RAM: 512MB! I opened the machine itself (the RAM is under the keyboard), and lo! and behold! the only DIY RAM slot was EMPTY (this iBook has 512MB of soldered RAM). Basically, when Apple shipped the replacement machine, they shipped a “basic similarly-specced machine”, with the default RAM allocation, and we never noticed (the G3 iBook had, if I remeber well, 1GB of RAM). So my wife had been running Tiger for more than a year with 512MB of RAM with no complaint at all, and when she switched to Leopard, the only complaint was too much HDD access noise?

This is something I love with Apple: each release of OSX actually brings more performance to older systems. OK, maybe I won’t try and install 10.5 on my 366MHz clamshell iBook with 320MB of RAM, but 10.3/10.4 sort of run fine on it, especially for iTunes, which NEVER skips a beat, even when the whole GUI is frozen because there isn’t a single CPU cycle left.

Kudos Apple, for allowing us to keep our beloved old machines.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 12:01 CET and is filed under Apple talk. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.