Seeking ibook advice

[bossass]

I have a 30gb 14inch, 800mhz ibook that has given me two good years of service. I've got the harddrive filled with music and stuff and have about 4gb free (thank god I can store shit on my ipod). My ibook has been getting quite tempermental and sluggish of late. Especially my Microsoft Word has been freezing up every 45 minutes or so and I often loose a bit of work whenever I have to force quit. This is especially frustrating for my GF who's writing graduate school lit papers on it. Also, my iPhoto used to work great, but now it's like pulling teeth to navigate around in it or to get it to boot up or quit. What's up with that. I only have about 100 photos in it since I moved like a thousand of them to my ipod a while ago. Anyway, is there some way to tune up my computer? What do I need here? Do I need to free up hard drive space, or get a HD upgrade? Or do I need more memory. I currently have 128mb built in and 128mb in a slot, which could be switched for a 512mb. Would this make a big difference? Or do I need to defrag? I don't exactly know how to do that or what it is exactly or if it would help. OR....should i just sack up and go into credit card debt for a new Powerbook (drool...)? Any suggestion are appreciated. Thanks.

[focus]

Open up your disk utility and try repairing permissions.... usually seems to speed me up a little when i'm slowing down.

edit...adding another 256 of memory should speed you up quite a bit. my powerbook's 1ghz w/ 1.25gb memory and even w/ all that sometimes i get impatient w/ it.

[Big E]

One of the IT geeks here at work told me that you should have at a minimum 10% free space on your hard drive, and preferably something like 40% (which seems a little excessive). I am currently on a blazing 450 MHz G4 w/ 384 Mb RAM, so I'm pretty much at the limit of the machine's usefulness here.

Still, I did manage to make a 7 minute movie in iMovie w/o anything crashing. Slow, oh Lord yes, but no crashes.

[The Jackamo]

^^not to hijack, but if you do decide to buy a new laptop, i'm in the market for one and would definately be interested in buying the one you have now. pm me if you decide on getting a new one and we'll work something out.

[Platinum Pete]

More RAM will make all the difference. It is cheap on the web, don't go to the apple store. It is not hard to install.

[the_eleven]

More RAM!!!

I run a network of 5 Macs, from G3 iBooks through G4 Powerbooks.

All of them have the maximum RAM installed, because RAM is cheap.

They all run flawlessly & never crash, (really) which makes my life easy!

That said, the advice to leave some headroom in your HD is also right on.

I am not sure if there is a magic number, but since the drive is constantly rewriting to different locations, it makes sense that you need some headroom.

I would guess that 10-15% minimum is reasonable.