Friend has a "slow" iBook...

[Joe]

Her complaint:

" so i have a pc desktop and an ibook. my ibook is 800 mghz. havnt 
upgraded the ram past 256 yet. got it just in early december. i cant 
help but to say...this thing isnt very fast. when i click on the hard 
drive it takes a couple seconds to even open...etc etc. im thinking of 
upgrading to a g4 powerbook. but damn this thing should be running 
faster..any suggestions on how to speed it up through OS settings? im 
kind of dissapointed in spending 1600 dollars and im somewhat new with 
owning a mac. anyone else have this delay in running apps as simple as 
the hard drive viewer? maybe it is just mine. i was told a g3 800 mghz 
runs roughly as fast as a pentium 1.6 - 1.8. but my pc is in that range 
and totally kills this ibook in speed. everything opens instantly.."

I told her to get more RAM asap and turn off Genie Effect....my 600mhz  
iBook runs fine with 640 mb of RAM. But I've also played with a 14 in 
iBook and it didn't seep to lag as badly as she described...Any more 
tips you could give her?

TIA from both of us!