This is an addendum to my review of the PowerBook 1400, which ran in H-MAC about a week ago.
Today I upgraded the RAM in my new PowerBook 1400cs using a 12Mb card made by Newer Technology and purchased from MacConnection for $189. (A 12Mb card made by a less well known company can be purchased from MacConnection for about $20 less.)
In the last ten years, I have installed RAM and done other upgrades and repairs in dozens of desktop Macs and PowerBooks. The 1400 is easier to add RAM to than any previous PowerBook, easier even than many desktop Macs, at least the older ones. (The old compact Macs like the Mac Plus or Classic were quite a challenge to get into, and you absolutely had to have some special equipment. In more recent desktop Macs, on the other hand, you may not even need a screwdriver.)
Anyway, to open the case of the PowerBook 1400 and get to the expansion slot, you no longer need a Torx-8 screwdriver; a small Philips head screwdriver will do. (In my full review I suggested that a flat-head screwdriver was needed; that was wrong.) You go in through the speaker grill behind the keyboard, which is about a foot wide (from the left to the right side of the computer) and an inch deep. That grill slides and pops out easily. Then you unscrew the metal heat shield to get to the expansion connectors. At this point it is very easy to snap in either an Ethernet card or a RAM card. In some earlier PowerBook models, snapping the expansion card into place was awkward to say the least.
Best of all, where earlier PowerBooks had only one RAM expansion slot, the 1400 allows you to install one or two. If I decide later that the 28Mb I have now is not enough, I can, say, buy an additional 8Mb card for about $100, and piggyback that card on top of the one I installed today. This makes so much sense it is hard to remember why previous PowerBooks haven't permitted it--but they didn't. In earlier PowerBooks, if you found that your first upgrade was inadequate, you had no choice but to pull it out to accomodate the replacement; and about the only thing you could do with the first card was try to sell it. (Actually, I'm trying to sell an 8Mb RAM card for a PowerBook 5300 at the moment. Interested parties should e-mail me....)
I should remind everyone that, although the installation is easy, it is still somewhat risky.
If you plan to open one up, you ought to know something about working with sensitive electronic equipment. And for Heaven's sake, be sure to GROUND YOURSELF!
What are the advantages of more RAM? Well, first, if you have more memory available, you can run more applications simultaneously, or you can allocate more memory to the applications that you do run. Most applications run better--i.e. not just faster, but with a reduced risk of freezing--if you assign a little more than the amount shown to be "preferred" in the application's Get Info window. And some applications (such as Netscape) will benefit if you allocate to them substantially more than they demand. Second, the computer as a whole runs faster when you have more RAM. Real RAM is much faster than Apple's virtual memory, faster even than Connectix's wonderful RAM Doubler. When you have lots of real memory, the computer can juggle blocks of data more efficiently, and that translates into an increase in speed. So even ordinary operations like opening folders in the Finder or printing happen more quickly after you install more memory. So more memory is an UNEQUIVOCALLY GOOD THING. And at the moment, memory is cheap. With 28Mb of physical RAM, I have configured RAM Doubler so that provides me the advantages of file mapping (this allows PPC-native applications to demand less RAM from the system), without doubling my logical RAM (which slows the computer down a little).
©1996 Will Porter / Houston, Texas