Newbie and hard drives

[chuckalicious]

Hi, I'm a converted PC to Mac user, which is very cool

I moved from a Sony Vaio desktop (gorgeous) and a Compaq 1Ghz laptop to the new G4 iBook (14").

I have a couple of questions. This iBook comes with a 4200rpm hard drive, and 512Mb of RAM. I noticed that although applications, such as Firefox, Mail etc are very quick to respond once opened, they are a bit sluggish to start for the first time from closed. Is this more to do with the RAM or the HDD? I'm suspecting it's the low RPM of the HDD that causes the slow loading times. Is there anything that can be done to speed this kind of thing up? I know it's not a big problem, but it's one of those things that bugs me.

Secondly, do you think upping the amount of RAM to say 1Gb would make a difference?

I read a few threads on here about replacing your HDD with a 5200 or 7200rpm drive, which I'm confident I could do (not until after my warranty runs out!), but I had a couple of questions on that...

1. Does anyone know of any actual performance increases by changing the HDD?
2. Does the increased speed cause issues with heat?

Lastly, when I bought the iBook, I had decided I wasn't going to play games (I used to be a big gamer, but got very bored of it and wasnt willing to upgrade my PC every time a new game came out) however I was wondering what kind of performance I'd get from some of the older games like UT 2004 or Enemy Territory. I know the 32Mb vRAM is pretty poor, but is it enough to play something like that?


Anyway, enough of the negatives.....

The iBook is gorgeous and is a joy to use. A friend who is a mac user had always said Macs "just work" and you know, he's right. I turne don bluetooth for the first time, connected it to my mobile (much easier than in Windows) and then synced it with address book. How easy was that??! So much better than Windows.

I've found myself dragging 2 fingers down the trackpad on my laptop at work (and it not working of course!!) and trying to close windows in the top left hand corner!!

One last thing, and it's not a biggie. Since the day I got the iBook (about 1 month ago) I get crashes in iTunes. I've updated it to the newest version and it still crashes during CD imports if I've already imported a couple of CDs..... very odd. Any ideas?

 

[Biturbo V12 AMG]

Yes the HD speed will improve performance, but on a laptop the faster the HD the more battery it uses. so i recommend not going past 5,400rpm on a laptop drive unless you use your laptop as a desktop replacement then i would get a 7,000 rpm drive. By adding more memory wont make applications open faster but will improve the performance of the opened application.

really laptops arnt good gaming computers they usually have components built for power-saving rather than performance. so games will not play as good on a laptop vs a desktop.

about your itunes problem that does sound strange. the only thing i can think of is that your CDs are scratched, can you give us info if it still crashes with a new CD? your CD drive might be dirty also. but i would first check to see if it crashes when you import a new cd that has no scratches, then i would use disk utility and see if anything is wrong on your computer, then i would get the CD drive cleaned.

 

[chuckalicious]

Thanks for the reply. I may or may not replace the drive, I don't know, I'll see how I get on with this one.

If I remember correctly, iTunes crashed on both old and new CDs. I don't think the drive will be dirty because it did it about 20 minutes after I took it out the box! (ripping a CD was one of the first things I did with the iBook). Basically the software gives an error of application failure, and then closes or restarts.