RAM question

[Sarah Andrews Cook]

Hi everyone,

I have two iBooks - one is mine, and one is my employer's. My
work iBook is a 12" 500Mhz 20GB CD-ROM, and is the machine I have
a question about.  (My personal iBook is a 12" 600Mhz 20GB Combo
drive, in case you were wondering.) I am not a super technical
person - I can find my way around my computer better than the
average person, but I don't really think that's saying much. ;-)
So I'm looking for a little advice.

My work iBook currently has 384MB of memory, and is running
10.2.8. I use it mainly for e-mail (Mail.app), Word, Excel,
accessing shared FileMaker Pro databases (running in Classic),
Safari, etc. I usually have most of those applications open at
once, and switch back and forth pretty frequently. I do not do
any major graphics, number crunching, code compiling, etc. 

I find that in those applications, my machine can be slow, but
not unusable. I get the spinning beach ball more than I would
like (actually, what I find even more irritating than the beach
ball is the delay or lag I often see before the beach ball even
appears). I know that a speed bump would probably come with
moving to panther (since I have panther on my home machine), but
I don't think that will be an option right now - our organization
has a ton of macs and they are still in the process of upgrading
people from OS 9 to OS X, so as one of the first movers to
Jaguar, I don't think I will see an upgrade to Panther until
everyone gets to X (no seconds until everyone has had their first
serving!).

At this point, budgeting for hardware is starting for the next
fiscal year (which starts in July). I don't think I'm on the list
for a new machine (though that could change), and honestly, as
long as my usage doesn't change my book will remain reasonably
usable for the next year. If I keep this book for another year,
though, I'm trying to make the argument that maxing out the RAM
to 640MB would make a noticeable difference. It's also much
cheaper than a new machine.

And after all of this exposition, finally, here is my dilemma:
the director of our data unit (who is in charge of hardware
buying and upgrades) is telling me that, for the applications I
use, an increase from 384 to 640MB will make minimal difference,
that I wouldn't really notice an increase in performance, due
mainly to the limitations of the processor. This runs counter to
everything I've heard (basically, that increasing RAM will always
help), but he's also much more of an expert than I am, so I'm
wondering if he's right. Can anyone shed any light on this for
me? Any websites out there, benchmarking, etc. you could direct
me to?

Thanks in advance for any info you can provide!
pax,
Sarah

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