PowerBook G4 RAM upgrade

A friend of mine came over a week ago with an old PowerBook G4 and asked if I could get the OS up to date (he brought the OS 10.5 disk) and make it run faster. Well, considering it’s a 2004 machine with
1 GHz PowerPC processor I figured it would be able to run the latest Apple operating system (fresh install, NOT an upgrade) with a bit more memory muscle. It had 512 MB of RAM which would allow OS 10.5.x to run, but would most likely make that experience slow and painful.

In order to mitigate this, I ordered two 1 GB RAM SODIMMs from Crucial. In addition, you can use their “Crucial System Scanner” tool to determine what kind of RAM you need. Memory came in today, but I had trouble opening the memory slot door as I couldn’t find the necessary #0 Phillips screwdriver. Considering that I can always use a new good set of precision screwdrivers I took a drive to Micro Center in Paterson, NJ and bought myself a complete toolkit. 🙂

With everything I needed in place I began the RAM upgrade. By the way, here are major steps needed during laptop memory upgrade:

1. Turn the computer off
2. Unplug the power adapter/cable
3. Ground yourself
4. Take the battery out

Once I did all of that, I’ve removed the 4 tiny screws from the bottom of the laptop and took the old memory out (in this case, two 256 MB DIMMs). Then I placed new DIMMs in; screwed the door back on; placed the battery back in place and pressed the power button.

Memory upgrade is complete, all that is left is to confirm it.

Once your system boots up, you can check if the machine recognizes the new RAM by clicking on the Apple logo and then selecting “About This Mac” option.

As you can see it recognizes the newly installed 2 GB of RAM.
That’s all, not much to it. 🙂 Happy computing!