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

[Zane H. Healy]

At 4:40 AM +0000 1/22/08, Stroller wrote:
>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 can't use Mail.app, I'm still more or less happily on Eudora.  I do 
have Mail.app setup to pull logs from a couple servers, and from a 
3rd email account that is setup to get one mail list.  It's unusably 
slow, with even that light load.  It couldn't handle my primary 
account, especially with the 11+ years of email I have in Eudora.

>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 absolutely hate this behavior, but haven't taken the time to figure 
out how to fix it.

>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).

This is one of the reasons I went with Lightroom.  It isn't designed 
to encourage system upgrades.  BTW, Lightroom now has stacks.  After 
using it for a month, I can't imagine not having it.


>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.

My WinXP box (an E6700 Core 2 Duo built specifically to play "Dawn of 
War") will also boot into Ubuntu Linux.  I've used Linux since 
January of '92 (longer than I've used a Mac), while I'm inclined to 
prefer Linux to Mac OS X (I also prefer Solaris or IRIX to Linux), I 
stay on the Mac for one simple reason.  Better applications.  While 
I'd like to move off of MS Office, I've yet to find a good 
replacement, and I'm not even trying to move off of Adobe.  Plus the 
iLife apps are pretty good.

I'll run 10.4.11 for the foreseeable future, I bought the 10.5 family 
pack, but right now only have it on my wife's MacBook.  There are 
features in 10.5 I want, but I'm waiting on it to stabilize more.

>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

Well, there you go, part of your problem is your usage model.  I'm 
even worse, I have probably that many open in Safari at this time, 
but I also have more open in Firefox.

I currently have the following running:
Safari
Firefox
Eudora
MS Word (only 3 documents open today)
Acrobat 6 Pro
Calender
iTunes
X-Windows (just an Xterm to my OpenVMS server)
terminal.app
iChat
Backup

This is a *very* light load, the system was rebooted on Saturday, and 
I've not had much time to use the system in the past couple days as 
I've been working on a couple projects.  I typically also have Excel, 
Lightroom, and a few other apps open (iPhoto, Photoshop, InDesign, 
etc.).  I'm sitting at 4.5Gb RAM (2x256, 2x512, 2x1, 2x1), and like 
you to upgrade I'll have to pull perfectly good RAM.

One thing I like about Firefox is that you can force quit it, then 
restart it and be right back where you were, all your old sites will 
be in the right tabs, but you've freed up a lot of memory.  Firefox 
on Linux is as much of a RAM hog as on a Mac.

So as you can see from this, the reason I can't live on a Mac with 
only 4Gb of RAM is my own bad habits.  OTOH, I do need the extra 
drive bays that the Mac Pro offers, as I'd prefer to keep as much 
space off of external drives as possible.

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.         |
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