How much RAM is enough for Tiger these days?
Tiger alone will eat up 512 megs of RAM. If you have any less than 512 and run OSX, you are guaranteed a faster computer with more RAM!
If you have 768 megs of RAM or more, you may or may not see a speed increase. On my computer, I had 512 and got the spinning beach ball a lot, but after upgrading to 768, I rarely get the spinning beach ball at all now.
Note if you are running photoshop, the more RAM the better.
Tiger and Panther have a nice progRAM called the Activity monitor to see how much RAM you are using, it will also let you see which progRAMs are hogging all the RAM and CPU time as well.
Activity monitor is located in the Utilities folder. Run Activity monitor and click on the system memory tab. Next to the pie chart is how much RAM you have (my computer said 768). Then look at how much is free. If your free RAM is less than 20 megs while only running activity monitor, then you are using all the available RAM and may (or may not) see a jump in speed with more RAM. If you have over 40 megs of RAM free you may be OK.
Run some of the programs that you normally run and watch the free RAM go down. If you run everything you typically run and still have more than 40 megs of free RAM then you have plenty of RAM. OS X will never let the RAM dip much below 10 megs so don't let the fact that you have 10-20 megs of RAM fool you into thinking that you have plenty of RAM.
If you have an extra slot, upgrading RAM is easy, if not you have to rip out some old RAM to put in some new RAM.
Go to the Apple menu and 'About This Mac' then click on 'more info...' this runs a program called the system profiler.
Click on Memory. It will show what the RAM sticks are in your computer already and how fast they are. If you have 512 megs of RAM it will most likely show two 256 DIMMs.
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There is also a program called MacTracker that will tell you a lot of information about your mac Download it here. It will tell you exactly what kind of RAM you computer uses.
You can go to this Apple website to see how many slots your computer has.
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Then you can go to the Apple RAM store to see how much extra RAM costs for your computer from Apple.
Note that Apple usually charges a premium for the RAM, there are 3 other websites that sell RAM that are good
Datamem (cheapest one)
All three websites goes into much more detail about upgrading your system than the Apple website.
When you get the RAM you have to open up your computer and put it in. You can google some instructions on how to do that. For my system I googled 'Imac G4 RAM upgrade'
Two things about RAM
1. They hate static electricity.
--While we usually don't have much static here in South Texas, if we do have a cold winter day, it would be wise to not do the upgrade on carpet.
2. They are held in by two clips, one on each side. If the RAM is flush against the board, it will have two metal clips that go away from the RAM. If it is perpendicular to the main board, it will have plastic clips that push down into the board.
Put the new RAM in exactly like the old RAM came out.
If your computer won't start up after adding RAM, you most likely bought the wrong kind of RAM, and you can just put the old RAM back in.