Got my new memory. I'll be curious to see what kind of performance difference there is in OSX with 512megs instead of 128megs. I'll report back. (And I'll repeat my plea: memory is cheap, cheap, cheap. Buy more. If you don't have at least 256megs of RAM you should definitely buy more. 256megs for an iMac costs around $60 and will make your computer much faster.)
Well, they sent me the wrong kind of RAM, and so I had to get it reshipped. Blah. I've had 512megs now for a few days. It's faster, for sure, but not as much as I had hoped. The difference between 128 and 512 is actually not noticable to me most of the time. Menus aren't faster. Resizing windows isn't faster. But with 128megs I'd occasionally get the spinning ball (the 'you must wait now' symbol) when switching among applications, or just switching back to the finder, and sometimes it would last for a really long time. My hard drive would be going crazy during these episodes. I guess that's virtual memory paging in and out. Is that what "thrashing" is? Anyway, that - thankfully - doesn't happen anymore. And that is definitely worth it right there. But I was hoping to speed up everything as well as fix that problem, and really it only seems to have fixed that problem.
Still, it's cheap, so I'm not complaining. But I doubt more would help at this point.
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- jim 1-07-2002 7:12 pm
Well, they sent me the wrong kind of RAM, and so I had to get it reshipped. Blah. I've had 512megs now for a few days. It's faster, for sure, but not as much as I had hoped. The difference between 128 and 512 is actually not noticable to me most of the time. Menus aren't faster. Resizing windows isn't faster. But with 128megs I'd occasionally get the spinning ball (the 'you must wait now' symbol) when switching among applications, or just switching back to the finder, and sometimes it would last for a really long time. My hard drive would be going crazy during these episodes. I guess that's virtual memory paging in and out. Is that what "thrashing" is? Anyway, that - thankfully - doesn't happen anymore. And that is definitely worth it right there. But I was hoping to speed up everything as well as fix that problem, and really it only seems to have fixed that problem.
Still, it's cheap, so I'm not complaining. But I doubt more would help at this point.
- jim 1-15-2002 7:55 pm