[X4U] Re: Expandable Mac's [b]

[Stroller]

On 21 Jan 2008, at 19:44, Zane H. Healy wrote:
> ...
> I'm curious as to which apps.  I do know the latest version of  
> Adobe Acrobat Reader is quite sluggish.  I'm still using 6.0.2  
> Professional. IIRC, the Dreamweaver CS3 demo I tried was sluggish  
> as well.  I find Adobe Lightroom to work quite nicely on my G5 2x2,  
> though iPhoto has gotten very sluggish.  I think these are the  
> extent of my complaints.  My G4/450 after 4 years was almost  
> unusable it was so slow, same with the 8500/180 after 2-3.

Believe it or not, Mail is my biggest gripe here. It takes just a few  
seconds to open a mailbox when I switch to it - not long enough to  
make it unusable, but enough to make me tap by fingers in irritation.

I see that my ~/Library/Mail here is 4.9gig, so the bottleneck here  
may well be disk access - I have to admit that I haven't defragged  
this drive in a while, and that has made a difference in the past. So  
it's not sure that a MacPro would make _much_ difference - the CPU  
would surely make a _little_ difference, at least - but I guess with  
4 drive bays I could RAID a couple of cheap SATA drives for speed and  
use them just for my home directory.

I won't use Acrobat Reader, and am narked with the way it has  
recently taken over Safari on this machine. I will look into fixing  
that when I do my reinstall for 10.5.

I tried Lightroom during the beta, but ended up with Aperture. I  
can't remember all the details, but I think there were a couple of  
things in Lightroom that I wasn't happy with & that I couldn't see  
fixed within a release or so, and I really liked Aperture's stacks.  
Nevertheless, with my ATi 9800 I'm finding Aperture more & more  
cumbersome, yet I refuse to pay hundreds of pounds for a replacement  
Apple card (even secondhand they're this price).

In fact, even though I don't use it that much, Aperture is my biggest  
sticking point against again trying Linux seriously on the desktop. I  
don't think there's anything in the OSS world which takes the  
Aperture / Lightroom approach to RAW files. I really liked the KDE  
interface last time I used it, and it was only one recurring bug that  
I couldn't get to the bottom of that pushed me away from it - from  
everything else I can see Linux desktops have improved immensely in  
the last 5 years, and I have no reason to think that they'd give me  
the same sort of problems I experienced previously. I believe that it  
is impossible under 10.5 to have the dock at the top of the screen -  
I have been happy with having to `write defaults` manually upon  
install since 10.2, so 10.5 needs to make a positive impression in  
other respects to keep me Mac.

Safari also kills me. I tend to keep windows open for weeks at a time  
- uptime here is 46 days, and I have 16 Safari windows open in the  
dock right now. I may refer to none of these again today - most of  
them are to remind me to read the open website when I get a chance to  
do so (and to follow up on the subject, of course!) - and most of  
them have open tabs, too. So I guess the question is whether a  
processor upgrade would make Safari load pages more quickly, or  
whether I'd be better off spending a bit of money on RAM - right now  
Safari consumes 1.05gig of real memory, 3.93gig of swap and many  
pages are frustratingly slow, causing glitches in YouTube if I open  
another page in a background tab. I'm at 3gig RAM right now, and  
since mine is the 1.8gig G5 with only 4 RAM slots, I'd have to throw  
away a gig in order to upgrade by only 33%. Of course, part of me  
rails at Apple over my unconventional browsing habits - surely my  
3gig would be better utilised by Konqueror in Linux?   ;)

Stroller.