[X4U] Macbook Pro

[Zane H. Healy]

At 7:58 PM -0700 5/12/07, Philip J Robar wrote:
>On May 12, 2007, at 5:42 PM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
>
>>You've got that right. We just got my wife a Macbook, and maxed it 
>>out at 2GB, while that's enough for 10.4.9, and the light usage 
>>it's going to get, I'm a little concerned about even 10.5.
>
>I'm not. I'm willing to bet that most of that 2 GB is inactive or 
>only being used for I/O buffering.
>
>My poor little 12" 1.33 GHz G4 PB with 768 MB runs, umm, not 
>optimized not 10.4.x just fine. With FireFox (3 windows, ~20 tabs), 
>Mail, Azureus, iTunes, Terminal, Finder/OS X and all its deamons 
>running I still have ~200 MB of inactive memory.

It all depends on the system used, and how RAM intensive your apps 
are, at the moment, with the way that the Macbook I mentioned is 
being used (and because I've not installed much of anything on it 
yet), it could easily get by with 1GB, maybe even 512 (not that I'd 
be willing to try).

>>My G5 2x2 needed more RAM with 3.5GB, though with the 5.5GB I just 
>>went to it is feeling a lot better.
>
>"feeling a lot better", uh which benchmark is that from?
>
>Yes, I'm being a smart-ass, but I have the disadvantage of not only 
>being a software engineer, but having been trained as a scientist 
>and psychologist in a program that demanded intellectual rigor. So 
>when I hear people talk about the need for GBs of physical memory 
>with no reference to the work being done, the benchmark which 
>demonstrates that need, or being able to "feel" the difference 
>between 3.5 and 5.5 GB of RAM my BS meter goes off. (Even given that 
>I still remember vividly the day my Sun workstation was upgraded 
>from 1 to 4 MB.)

Which benchmark is it from?  How about the experience gained from 
over 20 years of professional experience in the computer field 
telling me that the system needed more RAM, and that it is now far 
more responsive?  In spite of the "Mac OS X for the casual user" tag 
on this mail list, I think you'll find that many of us are computer 
professionals, and many of the members that aren't are still quite 
knowledgeable.

If you want a more technical answer, it was spending far to much time 
swapping to disk than is ideal, because I like to have several large 
applications (apps from MS Office, Adobe CS Premium, and a couple 
others) running pretty much all the time, and a couple of the 
applications that I run can use an ungodly amount of RAM depending on 
what I'm doing.  I could have probably gotten by with another 512MB 
RAM, but adding a full 2GB kit made more sense as it was my last free 
RAM bank.

In cases such as this is doesn't even take any professional 
experience to tell the difference, the system went from being 
sluggish and jerky to far more responsive and smooth in its 
operation.  My wife was able to see a serious difference in the 
systems performance.  If you can get by in less than 1GB RAM, I'm 
happy for you, but many of us here need significantly more.

Now as for an example of a computer with more RAM than it possibly 
needs, since you mention Sun Workstations, my current one has 4GB, 
I've got 8GB that I could put in it, but why bother, 512MB to 1GB at 
most would be enough for the way I currently use it.  At 5.5GB my Mac 
doesn't have more than it possibly needs as you seem to claim.

Zane


-- 
| Zane H. Healy                    | UNIX Systems Administrator |
| healyzh at aracnet.com (primary)    | OpenVMS Enthusiast         |
| MONK::HEALYZH (DECnet)           | Classic Computer Collector |
+----------------------------------+----------------------------+
|     Empire of the Petal Throne and Traveller Role Playing,    |
|          PDP-10 Emulation and Zane's Computer Museum.         |
|                http://www.aracnet.com/~healyzh/               |