How much memory do you have in your iBook

Currently I have about 310Megs (256+64). When I first started running 10.2 I only had 128. I don't recall 10.2 paging any more than 10.1, but it has been a while since I upgraded. OS X in general will page quite a bit (since it is a unix it burns a lot of memory on filesystem caches and such as well).

Take a look in /private/var/vm/ and see how many swapfiles it is using (it will create 80Meg swap files as needed). If you've got more than a couple more memory will likely speed things up.

If you plan on keeping your iBook for a while you might also want to consider buying a faster laptop hard drive for it. The drives in the older iBooks are seriously slow and you might get more of a speed improvement from a faster drive than more memory. The most effective upgrade I ever installed in my desktop mac (Beige G3/266Mhz upgraded to G4/500Mhz/640M RAM) was a 7200 RPM hard drive with a big cache.

-Mike