So I threw out one of my 512MB RAM sticks of my PowerBook G4 1.5GHz 15″ and put in a Kingston ValueRAM KVR333X64SC25/1G SO-DIMM 1GB DDR PC2700/333MHZ stick (that should have Googlers looking for info covered - I know I couldn’t find anything definitive when I tried - the stick mentioned does work with the PowerBook model mentioned, period).
Did it work? Yes, and oh how it worked. My Xbench benchmark more than doubled, and yes, I know that it’s been said that trusting Xbench to accurately be benchmarking is like analyzing the hiccups of a snail in order to detect tectonic movements, but I don’t care, because my PowerBook is now a whole lot faster.
Some examples:
When I want to glance at a Dashboard widget, I do use the hold-key-and-release way, and not the press-once-to-show-press-again-to-hide, because more often than not my widgets actually reload during the transition and not 10 seconds after, and that’s unheard of for me unless you have a clean new account and no other apps running.
Animations all over the place are way better. Frame rates have gotten way up.
OmniWeb now only takes seventynine eighties of infinity to boot up.
In general, apps start faster and they quit a lot faster. Without exceptions.
However, reloading a page in Safari and then reloading the same page in XP/IE still makes baby Jesus lie down and play dead. (While it’s gotten slightly faster, it’s still not a good situation. In the immortal words of Philip J. Fry: “Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it! Fix it!”)
The price for 1GB RAM sticks for laptops are henious and up there with armed robbery on the crime severity list, but once your wallet heals you won’t regret it in the least.