Can my iBook handle the workload?

Okay, I am traditionally a PC person, but my PC just died. My wife has an iBook that has worked beautifully for her for a year (while my PC gave me multiple headaches).

I run programs that are pretty demanding (sketchup and photoshop) on extremely large files - often 30 inches by 30 inches at 300 dpi. What I want to know is whether I could rely on her machine to run these programs or if we are looking at getting another machine. This is complicated by the fact that I am very clueless about (although impressed with) Macs.

The iBook has a PowerPC G4 (1.5) CPU at 1.33 GHz with 512 L2 cache. A bit of searching online uncovered some debate over whether or not this processor has velocity engine. I don't know what velocity engine is exactly (if someone could explain it, I'd appreciate it). How fast is this processor exactly? If you could give me a rough comparison with PC processors, that would be wonderful.

The graphics card worries me as it has 32M of memory only.

The RAM I would upgrade to 1.5 Gigs.

I know the ideal would be to purchase a powermac or a highend PC to handle the work, but the sad fact is that doing so would mean taking out a loan and I want to avoid doing that if possible.

Advice?

It may help to mention that I was running the programs on a PC with a Pentium M and 1 Gig of RAM (but a better graphics card) and it worked well enough.

the ibooks is going to be very slow for it...it would be good to consider a newer computer.

There is absolutely no reason why the iBook wouldn't be able to handle that.
I used to have an iBook that was only 1GHz with 1.25 GB of RAM and I never had a problem with large Photoshop files.
You should be just fine.

There are some maintenance tools and other techniques you can do to speed the thing back up I think. Since I am a nOOb when it comes to such programs, I can only wait until someone more knowledgable than me shows up to fill in the blanks...

Also, I wouldn't think that additional memory for the iBook would be expensive at all.

postitnote100 said:

The graphics card worries me as it has 32M of memory only.

Click to expand...

Just noticed this. Photoshop is 2D. VRAM doesn't make much difference with 2D apps. 32 MB is fine for graphics work, I have done much more with much less (8 MB VRAM Lombard PowerBook).
So again, you will be fine with the iBook for your needs.

what will you be doing in photoshop? mine crawls for some editing, but for basic easy fixes its fine...