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Apple iBook "Clamshell" RAM?

post #1 of 9
6/14/04 at 10:51pm
Thread Starter 
My girlfriend has one of these older iBooks (called "Clamshell" often times). The ones that have the little carrying handle and all. Well anyway, it only has 96MB of RAM in it, and I wanted to upgrade/replace the RAM in it so she could run Mac OS X. I'm not a huge mac fan, I use Windows incase anyone is wondering.

But anyway-- on the the real question

Does anyone know what type of RAM exactly these iBooks take? Also number of slots or max RAM capacity? Apple's website doesn't seem to have a lot of info on this. Unless I am just not looking in the right places, I don't know the website that well, don't go there very often. I'm still looking about the net for the answer but if anyone knows this, that would be great.

Thanks,
Aaron
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post #2 of 9
6/14/04 at 11:29pm
Specific information depends on the exact model iBook that she has. However, from what you are describing, I assume it is probably some iBook G3 variant. According to this page, these generally have 32 MB or 64 MB of built-in memory and one sodimm slot that can be use to add another 512 MB, for a total of 576 MB or 544 MB. Older models use PC66 memory, newer ones use PC100 (or higher) memory.

To make this process easy, just find out the specific model of the iBook and then use the configurator on Crucial.com to find the appropriate memory.
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post #3 of 9
6/14/04 at 11:36pm
Thread Starter 
Thanks, I seemed to have found that same page recently as well. Just can't find PC66 anywhere. Ha, I didn't even know it existed. Think PC100 would work fine?
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post #4 of 9
6/14/04 at 11:38pm
PC100 or PC133 should work fine; it will just run at the lower PC66 speed.
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post #5 of 9
6/14/04 at 11:47pm
Thread Starter 
Alright thanks! I found a 256MB stick that should work. That's a lot better than her current 96MB

http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProduc...211-124&depa=1

Thanks,
Aaron
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post #6 of 9
6/15/04 at 12:02am
I don't know if you have a Mac Store, or a Mac Hardware where you live, but they have parts for older Mac's I know, you might check it out.
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post #7 of 9
6/15/04 at 3:45am
A couple more things:
I noticed that you intend to run OS X on the iBook. Just so you know, OS X loves to devour memory. It uses a ton for its video display (each window takes a surprisingly large amount of memory) and it has a rather agressive disk caching scheme that greatly improves system responsiveness and decreases hard disk access if it has enough memory. You can check out this article or this one for more info.

Basically, the take home message is to get the higest capacity sodimm that the machine supports, e.g. 128, 256, or 512 MB, depending on the machine and firmware version. The cost difference between the different sodimms is only ~50 bucks, so cost shouldn't be much of an issue. Just make sure that the sodimm will work with the iBook.

Also, I know this is counterintuitive, but for the best performance on an older system, make sure to get the most recent version of OS X, i.e. 10.3, which is the most optimized.
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post #8 of 9
6/15/04 at 9:38am
Thread Starter 
Yeah I was/am a bit worried about the performance on her little iBook as well. She doesn't need blazing speed or any sort, so I doubt it will bother her much. I ordered a 256MB stick for her, it was only 10 bucks more than a 128 stick. And yeah, I have 10.3 or whatever and messed around with it, it is definitely a lot more responsive than the original Mac OS X. Thanks for the help, I'll tell you how it goes!

Aaron
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post #9 of 9
6/15/04 at 11:21am
yeah i've got a blue and white g3 400mhz with 896 mb of ram. the thing still flies. RAM is everything when it comes to mac os x.
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