[Ti] Weird Screen Behavior...

[Kynan Shook]

b <galahad9 at earthlink.net> writes:
> Sort of. The OS 'takes' the space it needs, mostly for the Swap,
> right from the get-go. That's why a 30 GB drive, on a Mac with 1 GB
> RAM shows total space of 28,75 GB or so. The OS reserves double the
> physical RAM, probably. half for itself, half for OS 9's VM. Just a
> guess, but nothing else would really make sense. Where Photoshop is
> concerned, all P-Shop users know that it wants as much space as
> you'll give it for a 'scratch' disk. A partition is nice, because it
> can be erased or whatever, after projects are completed... giving
> Photoshop nice clean drive space to do its thing in. But it functions
> fine, as long as there is sufficient free space, and the
> less-fragmented, the better.

Bzzzzzt...  OS 9 was pretty bad about VM; it would take at least 1 MB 
more than you had installed (if you had it turned on).  OS X is 
infinitely better; it's always on, but it only takes what it needs 
(though it takes it in 80 MB chunks).  Right now, I have 4 swap files, 
which is abnormally high for me on 768 MB RAM, especially considering 
I've only been running my computer for 2 days.  Classic uses whatever 
it needs, just like any other OS X application.  If you want to see how 
many swap files you have, they're located in /private/var/vm.  You can 
get there in the Finder by doing Go->Go To Folder and then type 
"/private"
The reason why a 30 GB hard drive isn't 30 GB is because of a 
convenient marketing math technique; To a marketer, 30 GB=30,000 
MB=30,000,000 KB, etc.  To a geek and to the computer, 30 GB=30,720 
MB=31,457,280 KB, etc.  Since the basic unit of storage is a bit, a 
marketer's hard drive will always be a little bit bigger than the hard 
drive appears to the computer; when measured in GB, the marketer will 
get about an extra 7.3% (1024^3)/(1000^3).  Hence, my 18.62 GB hard 
drive is really a 20 GB hard drive.

> I run a lot of apps over here, audio/visual/ and tons of the usual.
> There are only two apps [actually, one app, and a 'Suite'] that never
> crash on me: Photoshop, and Office for Mac OSX. Everything else takes
> its turn giving itself the heave-ho. My experience is that Adobe
> P-Shop  runs great in Jag.

I pretty much never have ANY application crash.  Well, except that time 
that I was running Photoshop on a 300 MB TIFF with under a gig of free 
disk space, and it ran out of RAM while working...  So Photoshop is 
trying to use a bunch of disk space for its scratch disk, the OS is 
frantically swapping out data to get more RAM, and the hard drive is 
pretty much full anyway.

It wasn't pretty.



Kynan Shook
kshook at mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/kshook/index.html