Mac Mini 1.42Ghz RAM Upgrade

Question

Hello, first post so be kind!
Ive had my mac now for some time (Mac Mini 1.42Ghz G4 Power PC) which came with 512Mb of RAM. I am thinking about upgrading to 1Gb as I have just purchased a Digital SLR camera and the minimum photo size is 4Mb 8mp in Jpeg. When working with these pictures in Iphoto 5 there is considerable "thinking" by the Mac when manipulating or zooming in on the pictures.
Also Photoshop Elements which i bought the other day seems to work ok but sometimes the slowdown is experienced again when I use Bridge or just do something a bit more heavy with the features.
Ive been looking at memory modules from Crucial and Kingston but Ive also come across this from Samsung...
http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZX J2aWV3&product_uid=82592
Is this preferable as Ive heard apple use Samsung and also it appears to be a little faster? Will it work in my mac?
Im not overly technical so any help would be great

Answer 1

Welcome to the Apple discussions.
The PPC mini can use either PC2700 memory or PC3200 memory, however, it will only use PC3200 memory at PC2700 speeds - there is no speed benefit from using PC3200 memory. See this Apple note: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300572
You can confirm easily if your system can use more memory by checking the activity monitor. This is located on your hard drive in the applications/utilities folder. Bring it up, and look at the system memory tab. Note page ins/page outs. If you find page outs, which is how often the system has to page memory out to the hard disk to free up memory, to be greater than 10% of page ins, then a memory increase will help. Optimal would be to have zero page outs. While you're looking at that page, you might have questions about the categories of memory shown - this Apple notes details them: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107918
To see what's involved with upgrading memory, there's a good OWC video at http://eshop.macsales.com/tech_center/index.cfm?page=Video/directory.html . There's also a good pictorial at http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/82.13.0.html