Mac Advice - upgrading?

[major_clanger]

For the last two years my Mac has been a 2.0GHz Dual-core G5, with 1GB memory (as 2 x 512MB banks) and a 250GB hard drive. It's generally very nice, but it does sometimes thrash a bit running Photoshop; it doesn't help that Apple seem unable to fix Safari's chronic memory leaks that lead to it hogging progressively more memory until you Cmd-Q it and start over. The HDD is now also 80% full, thanks in no small part to my digital camera and iTunes. So, thoughts are turning to upgrades...

Memory: this is pretty much obvious, I take it? I know that it has to be installed in matched pairs, so the question seems to be if I add another 2 x 512MB or go for 2 x 1GB - or even more? Also, my current memory is DDR PC2-4200; will I see much benefit from going for faster memory than this for any expansion?

Storage: A second internal HDD? An external drive? Some combination of both?

Comments

[alex-holden.livejournal.com]

I've only noticed memory leak problems with Safari when at least one tab is displaying a PDF file. Currently running Safari 3.0.3 on OS 10.4.10 on both a G4 iBook and an intel Mini.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Interesting... I'd not noticed that correlation before, but I do end up displaying a lot of pdfs.

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

More RAM is always good. You'll also see a marked improvement in Potatoshop if you move its scratch file off the system drive onto something faster.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I take it that by 'something faster' you mean 'any drive that's not being flogged by the OS' rather than a particularly fast HDD of itself?

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

Both! :-)

I'm sure you could find a nice 10000RPM Raptor in a FW800 enclosure or similar.

[andrewducker]

Dunno about Macs, but unless you really, really, care about tiny performance increases it's not worth going for faster memory.

More memory is always good though - I found that going to 2Gig made a real difference when doing intensive work and playing games.

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

The best upgrade to my Mac I ever made was installing Firefox... ;P

Photoshop eats RAM, and two gig would not be unreasonable. If you can put another drive in and use that for PS's scratch files life would be sweeter too.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Big external disks are stupidly cheap at the moment. I got a USB2 0.5 TB recently for significantly less than 100 quid.

External Drives

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

They can be a useful option. Not a Mac user, so I don't know what your filesystem options are. If cross-platform access is likely to be an issue, yoou may have to stick with something old and cruddy such as FAT32.

USB2 is fast enough to run programs from. It'd be fine for storing pictures.

Memory is cheap right now.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I think the G5 pro machines use SATA internally for their drives. If so, you can probably whack a 1Gb drive into it for about 150-200 quid. Memory: about 50-70 quid per Gb. My suggestion would be ideally to yank your hard disk, install either 2Gb or 4Gb of RAM and a 750Gb or 1Tb disk, then install Leopard (giving it a virgin setup). Then reinstall your old drive and copy all your personal files off it, reinstalling your software along the way to get rid of the accumulated crud.

WARNING: Leopard doesn't include Classic any more. If you're still running on a Classic version of Photoshop (or anything else important, for that matter), hold off on Leopard until you've got new software upgrades ready to roll in. But I'd still recommend a huge new boot disk and a new operating system install (even if you're stuck on Tiger for a while) to shake things loose.