[HM] Re: Clean-up v. new computer

Sun Dec 8 12:32:18 PST 2002

i'm surprised at how many people open and quit programs throughout 
the day where i work. (most suprising tip i give people: the 
apple-tab key, which cycles through your open programs. people who 
don't konw that will as an alternative shut all their open browser 
windows, for example, or simply quit out of it, to get to word or 
whatever.)

i'm not a technician but in my anecdotal experience those people have 
lots of crashing problems. (this is all applicable to os9 only.) if 
you have that much ram, you should be able to give IE or n'scape 20 
or 30 mb's of ram. the experts can tell us if this makes sense, but i 
have all my programs in the startup folder, with the biggest ones set 
to open first. (put a space before the name of n'scape, IE, word, 
whatever mail program you use etc. to made that happen.) then, leave 
them alone through the day; don't quit out of them, and you should be 
ok, if that was indeed your problem.

if you're using n'scape for email, clear out your inbox occasionally. 
file old messages into folders. that screws it up sometime, i've 
noticed. (another fix i've noticed is that if you're sending zillions 
of emails back and forth with friends and you have the mail set to 
html, you can quickly overload your memory. go into preferences or 
option and uncheck the html box and things smooth right out.)

also, rebuild your desktop occasionally, which eliminates many 
problems as well.

>--- At Sat, 7 Dec 2002 22:38:19 -0500, J. Dobson wrote:
>
>>Another question
>>    Although I'm pretty good at self-teaching myself software programs, I'm
>>not good with knowing how and why the insides of these things work (as
>>you'll see below). Also, working alone, I don't know who to bounce some of
>>these questions off of. Hope you don't mind and can give me some guidance.
>>
>>I have a beige desktop G3 with 352 MB built in memory, with 266 MHz (is that
>>my problem?). I'm using system 9.0.4
>>
>>I'm having lots of problems with the internet (slow, crashes and freezes) as
>>well as with other programs. Most recent is saying that I'm out of memory,
>>when I know I'm not (fragmented?) I'm also the one that lost my dictionary.
>>(How the heck?)
>
>The short answer to your question is to give the application more memory
>using Get Info. The long answer is below and I hope is educational.
>
>---
>
>Reading this thread, it seems that there is plenty of misinformation
>surrounding how things work on a Macintosh (classic OS/9). These comments
>do not apply to OS/X.
>
>The Macintosh started off life as a single application computer. One
>program at a time was allowed to run. That model is still used today as
>silly as it seems. One of the side affects from that model is that each
>program is allocated a fixed amount of memory to use when it starts off.
>You can have 500 megabytes of RAM in your machine, but if the application
>is only allocated 10 megabytes then it only gets 10M.
>
>The RAM allocation is set using the Get Information window. Select an
>application in the Finder, select "Get Info" from the File menu (or press
>command (apple)-I). Depending on system version, the Memory setting may
>be access by selecting the popup menu in the Get Info window. Make the
>allocated number larger and the application will have more memory. These
>days simply adding a 0 to the end (10X) usually works good. Note that the
>application must not be running to make this change.
>
>Some other confusing issues that I have read on this thread (and
>experienced in conversations)... Your Macintosh has RAM and hard disk
>space. They are completely different. You files reside on the disk drive.
>Applications are loaded into memory (RAM) and executed from memory.
>Applications load documents into memory to edit them and save them back
>on the hard drive.
>
>Both your hard disk and RAM can become fragmented. Your hard disk can
>become fragmented as documents are saved and moved around on your system.
>This can, in extreme, cases cause some slowness to opening documents and
>doing some activities. One in particular is Internet web browsing. Web
>browsers keep lots of cached files to make things go faster. These causes
>lots of saved and deleted files. This is usually not that much of a
>concern however.
>
>RAM (memory) can become fragmented because of the way that applications
>are given a fixed amount of space to run in. That memory space is
>allocated by the system and the application is loaded into it and uses
>that space. If the application quits that space is left open. The problem
>comes from running many programs together and then quitting them in
>random order. Sometimes spaces are left between applications that cant be
>readily used by the next application. Basically the holes are too small.
>The solution to this problem is to either quit all of your programs or to
>just restart. Restarting is a little extreme but it can help. Personally,
>in 15 years of using a Macintosh, I have only experienced anything like
>this once or twice.
>
>The next bit of confusion is related to virtual memory. Most everyone
>will be using virtual memory. Virtual memory allows the system to run
>more applications than it has physical RAM space for. For example, if I
>have 256M of RAM, I can set my virtual memory to 512M. I can then run
>applications until the 512M space limit is reached instead of the 256M limit.
>
>Virtual memory uses your hard disk to make this happen. The system
>literally creates a (hidden) file on your hard drive that is the same
>size as the virtual memory you have set (512M in the example above). This
>space is used as an image of the "virtual" memory. As an application
>needs to run it can be loaded and executed from the physical memory. When
>another application needs to run, when there is not enough room in
>physical memory, the system will save out the memory being used by the
>current application to disk and then load the other one in. This happens
>relatively quickly so its not that much of a bother for normal use.
>
>Most of us have plenty of RAM these days (if you dont, buy more, its
>cheap). Virtual memory is now required to be on and it is usually set to
>1M over the size of the RAM space. Basically this means that we almost
>never use virtual memory and will not be a problem.
>
>Whew!
>
>I hope this long discussion has been helpful to try and fix some
>misconceptions and educate about how a Macintosh works. As someone else
>pointed out, there are several good books about how the internals of the
>Mac works.
>
>I hope this has been helpful.
>
>  ...Duane
>
>
>
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