[X4U] Macbook Pro

[Stroller]

On 13 May 2007, at 03:58, Philip J Robar wrote:
> ...
> For reference, the knee of the curve for Windows XP when performing  
> well defined general purpose multitasking application benchmarks is  
> right around 512 MB.

<AOL>

My customers are frequently amazed at the difference when I add RAM  
to their < 512meg PCs. I see a lot of 2 - 4 year-old Dells which were  
shipped with 256meg or even 128meg from the factory. The GUI  
latencies of these tends to make them EXTREMELY frustrating to work  
on -  512meg DIMMs are the best bang-per-buck at the moment and the  
difference one of these makes is quite astounding. Not only do I  
notice it but do my customers.

I guess that things like FSB speed and processor architecture have  
improved more in this time period, but processors' cited ghz seems to  
have increased little between these machines of 2 years ago & the  
ones I see sold today. Certainly I am sure that none of my customers  
could notice the difference between a 2-year old PC with 768meg RAM  
and a brand new one with the same amount of memory (providing fresh  
installs of XP on each).

> I wish I had similar information for Vista, but despite lots of  
> hand waving about Vista's memory needs I've yet to see any reliable  
> numbers published. (I'd welcome a pointer if anyone has one.)

I'm finding Vista slow with 1gig, but that may be the operations I'm  
doing on it - mostly copying data from the customer's old PC,  
installing applications and general configuration. There's a known  
issue with file-copy operations which cause them to be glacial to  
quite a silly degree - one could see this could easily be affecting  
installation of the many files programs copy to the h/d during setup,  
but also perhaps switching between tasks to furtle in control panel  
whilst this is going on.

> I'd also like to be able to quote similar figures for OS X, but I  
> don't read Mac related publications regularly anymore, and from  
> what I remember of them most of what passed for benchmarking left a  
> lot to be desired. (MacBench leaps to mind.)

http://www.kernelthread.com/ or http://osxbook.com/ might be worth a  
look, if you've got the time & the inclination.

Stroller.