Size matters.

Submitted by Jon on March 13, 2007 - 10:10pm

I upgraded my mini to 1GB of RAM tonight. It is certainly more responsive during use, esp. when multitasking. I logged in and started FireFox, which opens the last 6 tabs I had open when it was closed. Then I switched users to my wife's account and started up FF there which opened the last site she was at. I left it running then I went back to my account and opened iTunes and started the latest H*R podcast and left that running. Then I went to FF, went to Google Video and watched a streaming video. Switched back and forth to iTunes and FF and no hiccups. Butter smooth. Running Tiger is really great at 1GB. Heck even the 640MB in my iBook is smoother than the 512MB that was in the mini (smoother, not faster). Now I'll have to see if doing a DVD rip goes faster at all.

And to top it all off, the 1GB of Viking OEM'd Elixir RAM was still in a sealed AS bag. NIB from a nice guy on Craigslist, and I got it for only $35! I'm very happy. A quick search of the particular module online shows $120-ish to $140-ish! My P4 Linux machine went to 1GB too, with the extra 512MB DIMM from the mini.

Comments

Hawaii Cruiser's picture

Submitted by Hawaii Cruiser on March 13, 2007 - 10:18pm.

A big mini--kinda like a jumbo shrimp.

Submitted by Smiththers on March 14, 2007 - 1:47am.

i will say the same, i doubled the ram in my little old laptop and now it will play online video without skipping. ive since bought a 512 stick for my desktop and buying another 1gb stick soon... ram ram ram.... the more the better..

coius's picture

Submitted by coius on March 16, 2007 - 7:10pm.

the bump from 512MB to 1GB did a major increase, in as that my machine wasn't swapping to disk as much. The responsiveness increased by 70% too.
With a mac, it's even more so. Unix will use every bit of it, to run background processes. I think *nix requires more ram than any other system, due to the extra processes it runs to keep the machine from falling apart from errors, etc...

I got 768MB in my iBook 1.2Ghz and I will say, over the 256, it rocks compared to the laggines that the 256 caused. In order to do anything meaningful before I got the ram, i had to use 3rd party hacks to quit stuff like the finder, and of course, Tiger takes more than 256 to run, so when that went it, tiger's responsiveness shot up 100 fold

madmax_2069's picture

Submitted by madmax_2069 on March 16, 2007 - 11:21pm.

i went from 448mb ram to 768mb on my Beige G3 AIO. and i seen 10.4.8 running things more smoother and a bit faster than before.