[iBook] iBook1.2GHz & the beach ball

[Mike Wallinga]

Safari is pretty well-documented as a memory hog, and if you've had it 
running for quite a while, it may be using a couple of hundred megabytes 
of RAM by itself!  Here's a short, recent message board thread about the 
topic:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/8300945231/m/718009094731

The next time you feel your iBook acting sluggish, I would quit Safari 
(and maybe Mail, too) and then re-launch it, and see if that makes a 
difference.

I would only upgrade to Tiger if its new features (Spotlight, Dashboard, 
Automator, new Mail interface, etc) are attractive to you, not because 
it might use less RAM and/or be more responsive.  Honestly, I don't know 
if either of those claims are true or not.

Hope this helps,
Mike W.

Roger Harris wrote:
> Actually Tiger is worse at the problem you describe. This even  happens 
> on a dual 1.2GHz g4 to a lesser degree. Try Thunderbird as a  mail 
> client. This is not a RAM issue, I think it has more to do with  
> graphics load and the way smoke and mirrors have been employed to  make 
> the OS "seem" to be faster or more responsive at some task? I  try to 
> disable a lot of eye candy; And though I use Apple Mail it is  a slug 
> compared to Thunderbird. I never leave Mail running longer  than I need 
> it. Is mail set to do updates every few minutes?
> 
> roger

> On Aug 18, 2005, at 11:18 AM, M.Milligan wrote:
> 
>> I have an iBook, 2 USB, 1.2GHz, with 750MB ram. I notice when I  have 
>> Mail and Safari running, in OS X 10.3.8 the beach ball seems  to 
>> become more obvious when ever the computer seems to be thinking  or 
>> processing.
>>
>> Isn't 750MB RAM enough? Can I do something to not wait upwards of 5  
>> or 10 seconds everytime I want to page down a page on a url?
>>
>> Post privately if you wish. Thanks for the time.
>>
>> Is it time to move up to Tiger?
>>
>> M. Millligan