RAM Question

[Tom Burke]

On Thursday, March 18, 2004, at 07:00  pm, iBook List wrote:

> Message-ID: <20040318144551.38059.qmail at web40019.mail.yahoo.com>
> Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2004 06:45:51 -0800 (PST)
> From: Sarah Andrews Cook <paxsarah at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [P1] RAM question
>
> Hi everyone,

[snip

> I find that in those applications, my machine can be slow, but
> not unusable. I get the spinning beach ball more than I would
> like (actually, what I find even more irritating than the beach
> ball is the delay or lag I often see before the beach ball even
> appears). I know that a speed bump would probably come with
> moving to panther (since I have panther on my home machine), but
> I don't think that will be an option right now - our organization
> has a ton of macs and they are still in the process of upgrading
> people from OS 9 to OS X, so as one of the first movers to
> Jaguar, I don't think I will see an upgrade to Panther until
> everyone gets to X (no seconds until everyone has had their first
> serving!).

[another snip]

> And after all of this exposition, finally, here is my dilemma:
> the director of our data unit (who is in charge of hardware
> buying and upgrades) is telling me that, for the applications I
> use, an increase from 384 to 640MB will make minimal difference,
> that I wouldn't really notice an increase in performance, due
> mainly to the limitations of the processor. This runs counter to
> everything I've heard (basically, that increasing RAM will always
> help), but he's also much more of an expert than I am, so I'm
> wondering if he's right. Can anyone shed any light on this for
> me? Any websites out there, benchmarking, etc. you could direct
> me to?
>
> Thanks in advance for any info you can provide!
> pax,
> Sarah

Sarah

How much disk space have you got left? It sounds as if you may be short 
on disk space, in which case files, etc, will have been scattered all 
over the disk, making opening them/ saving them perceptibly (sp?) 
slower.

Is there a disk optimiser in OS X?

Tom Burke