Mac upgrade
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- lw-d
Hi people, I have been doing a lot of high res work in Photoshop lately and I have noticed a big decrease in performane.
I have an iMac 17inch widescreen with a 1 GHz PowerPC G4 processor and 512 MB RAM.
I would like to know what recommendations people had in order to increase performance, I upgraded the RAM about 8months ago, not sure If I can upgrade it again, I will have to check.
Somebody mentioned some time ago to be that it might be an idea to set up a dedicated swap disk, I have no idea how to set this up or what I need to purchase.
I would love to get a new iMac, can't afford it though.
Any help.
- horton0
what OS are you running?
512 MB RAM is not enough.
- lw-d0
I am running 10.3.9
Don't suppose you know how much I can upgrade with my iMac, I managed to install an extra 256MB but if I remember rightly, there wasn't much worth for anymore, I suppose I could take that out and replace with 512. That seems to be the biggest size I can buy for my iMac:
- horton0
+ don't move the swap disk unless you're familiar with Terminal. kinda sketchy and could get yourself into a big mess.
setting up a small scratch disk would be an easy improvement.
search it in PVN - been discussed a few times.
- lw-d0
Thanks, I'll take a look through the NT archives, I may get some RAM too?
Thanks
- ********0
ram. go for 1gb.
- lw-d0
Ok, I have about $300 to spend on this. I notice in previous threads that an internal hard drive would be the best option. Although there does seem to be an issue wether CS makes good use of this.
I am not very tecky, how hard is it to install an additional HD?
- Gilt0010
Well, you'll have to do an external hard drive. USB 2.0 would probably be your best bet. I don't think your generation iMac came with FireWire 800. All you have to do is plug in the drive, OSX will see it and mount it. Then you can use it for extra storage and tell photoshop to use that as a scratch disk. It's under the program preferences.
- lw-d0
Shit. Just noticed my hard drive is about 95% full, maybe an additional HD would solve more than one problem.
- lw-d0
Gilt001 - That the respone I was looking for.
Thanks, do you recommend any?
- lw-d0
This looks good to me:
- ********0
i would get 1 stick of 1gb of ram and put it along side one of your 256k of ram. then you would have 1.25 gigs of ram which will help alot.
You could get 2, 512 chips also. They are 66 bucks a piece at http://www.crucial.com/
- lw-d0
Thanks same, I am not sure how much I can upgrade the RAM on my iMac, according to the apple site, I cannot purchase 1GB for my particular model:
- ********0
ok, well get 2 sticks of 512. But DONT buy from Apple. They rape you with Ram Costs. That stick should only be half that cost in europe. Do a bit of research.
- lw-d0
Here is a quote from the archives:
apparently PS-CS2 does not rely on scratch memory like previous versions did.. i was surprised to read this in an Apple discussion the other day... so if CS2 is running slow it probably has more to do with your G4.
Is this true, and would purchaseing a dedicated swap disk improve performance?
- horton0
Shit. Just noticed my hard drive is about 95% full, maybe an additional HD would solve more than one problem.
lw-d
(Jan 16 06, 14:25)that's probablt your biggest problem. PS needs disk space (scratch memory) to perform at 100%.
have you been getting out of memory errors messages from PS?
get a new internal disk, partition it with a 3-5 GB scratch volume at #1, and consider some other partions to use the space better.
- lw-d0
I have just purchased this:
http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/…
...hopefully, setting up this drive as a scratch disk will solve my problem.
- de4k0
that will be nice
but you DEF need to upgrade your ram to the max your machine will take and crucial is the best...
http://www.crucial.com/store/lis…
- lw-d0
I bought from crucial last time. Might take a look, I wish I could know how much I can upgrade my iMac, how many sockets it has.
- de4k0
if you choose your imac form the list on the link
http://www.crucial.com/store/lis…
it will tell you at the bottom of the page what stuff you need and capacity etc
- lw-d0
The number of total memory slots in your Apple iMac (G4-1GHz PC2100 DDR) is 1 (1 bank of 1).
I think I filled this slot when I installed 256MB.
If that right, then all I can do is replace the 256 mb with 512 mb, can I also replace the one that came with the computer, i.e. purchase two 512MB's and replace the existing 2 x 256MB.
The only problem with that is that I will have 2 spare 256mb doing nothing.