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Apple's line of PowerBook laptops was intended for the professional and power users. The PowerBook line includes the PowerBook 100, Duo, 500, and 5300 Series; the PowerBook 1400, 2400, 3400; the PowerBook G3, G4 Titanium, and G4 Aluminum.

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Computer running very slow

How can I get my PowerBook G4 1.33 GHz to run faster?

Have done all the recommended things, like disc defrag, but it still runs very slow.

Can I install a faster processor?

Many Thanks

Billy.

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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Has the computer always run at the current speed or has it just slowed down? Ralph

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How much RAM do you have? If you have 256 or 512MB, upgrading to at least 1GB would likely give you a speed bump. And as Josh mentioned, 10.4 Tiger is the preferred OS for a PowerBook...they will take Leopard, but Leopard is a much slower, bloated OS, and it definitely lags on older laptops.

If you have a decent amount of memory and are running Tiger, and the speed is unsatisfactory, it's probably time to make the jump to a MacBook.

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10.5 would run fine on a 1.33Ghz CPU, the RAM seems to be the problem. If it is a DDR based mac, 266Mhz ram would slow it down compared to 333Mhz DDR PC2700

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What OS is it running? I would suggest 10.4 for that machine, as it is a very capable OS, but it is also optimized for older machines.

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Also a faster hard drive would help....

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After you defragmented, did you optimize? How much free space do you have on your drive? As lemerise said a 7200 rpm hard drive would give you a nice bump.

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What specific model do you have? Depending on which one you can max out between 1 and 2 gigs of ram. Also, if you specify which model, I can direct you to a fast 7200 rpm HDD which would increase speed.

Also do some software tweaks, such as weeding login items and checking for unnecessary daemons/background processes you can kill.

If you provide your model number we can help you a lot more specifically.

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Thank you all very for your comments.

Full Spec:

PowerBook G4 17"

Model: PowerBook 5.3

CPU Speed: 1.33 GHz

Memory: 2.GB

Bus Speed: 1.67MHz

OS: 10.4.2.

Has got very slow over the last few months.

Many Thanks

Billy

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Upgrade to 10.4.11 using the free combo update available here:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/ap...

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I would suggest updating your OS to 10.4.11 to start with. What software or hardware changes have you made in the last few months? What programs are running in the background and loading at startup? I don't know if any of this applies or helps but will eliminate possible causes. Ralph

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Thanks Ralph.

Have downloaded 10.4.11 (Silly me thought this was the version I was running)

and this has done the trick.

Many Thanks to all

Billy

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There might be lots of junk files, system caches, log files, universal binaries present in your Mac and these files consumes lots of memory spaces. I would like to suggest , use any speed up Mac third party tool by searching over internet.

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biljon will be eternally grateful.
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