I’ve had this iBook for approaching two years now, and I’ve been using it to do both almost everything for my day job plus my personal stuff for a year and a half. It came with 256M RAM, and early on I added another 512M. In my day to day work I frequently am running Eclipse, postgresql, and an instance of Tomcat on top of everything else that is standard workday stuff – Mail, Adium, Skype, etc. It was just getting to the point of pain recently, where the laptop would get bogged down and thrashy, particularly late in the day.
Last week I swapped out my 512M RAM stick for a 1G one (there is only one RAM slot), upgrading it to the maximum memory supported by this machine. Good gravy what a difference that made! That gives me enough that I can go all the way through my day, with all my apps running, without ever using up all my real RAM and requiring virtual memory. It makes me feel kind of dumb for not doing this a year ago. They say maxing out the RAM is the best upgrade value, and I have to say that this has been true for me. Everything is faster, and my day is better.
I won’t rant about my Apple hardware experience here, I’ll leave that for my own blog. 🙂
For optimum performance with Tiger, I find that disabling Spotlight’s auto-indexing does away with the most annoying of the slowdowns so far. I only run it weekly with a cron job, rather than twice daily as it does under Apple’s default hardwired settings.
I don’t remember how I did it, but I found the hint at http://www.macosxhints.com/