Freed from the bondage of 512MB.

At long last, I have gotten another 512MB of RAM for my desktop, leaving my 1GHz G4 PowerMac with a reasonable 1GB of RAM. What a difference it makes. At all times I have NewsFire, Safari, Mail, BBEdit, and iTunes running, and often need to keep ImageReady, iTerm, and Firefox open. Plus, permanent background apps like sidenote, AudioScrobbler, WeatherPop and pearLyrics add some additional overhead.

Now, with all basic apps open, I have 465MB free, which should be enough space for editing large images, intensive regexes, running Windows XP (in Virtual PC), and some serious fragging in Halo.

I think all I’ll do from here is add a bigger hard drive, and hold onto this system until Apple rolls out their Intel-based Macs next year. The question then is whether to be an early adopter and get an Intel system (with all of the perks that will come with that, including being able to run Windows, DOS, and Linux apps natively, within Mac OS X) or to get the final PPC system once the prices are slashed. I look forward to having the problem of needing to make that decision.

Published by Waldo Jaquith

Waldo Jaquith (JAKE-with) is an open government technologist who lives near Char­lottes­­ville, VA, USA. more »

5 replies on “Freed from the bondage of 512MB.”

  1. Wow, Waldo, I always assumed you ran a much phatter system than that, what with the 22″ LCD and all. Not that there’s anything wrong with the 1GHz G4, of course. :) Do you run Tiger on that thing? If so, how does it perform?

  2. I bought this desktop and my iBook shortly before starting school, in March of 2003, with the intention of sticking with ’em until I graduated and got back to work. The desktop was Apple’s newest and best thing when I got it. I’m still very happy with it — it’s rare that I feel that it’s in any way slow. In large part, that’s because my computing needs having really changed in the past few years — iTunes, BBEdit, a browser and ImageReady.

    I have 10.4.3 on here, and I haven’t had a lick of trouble. I run it on my 700MHz G3 iBook, too (which has 640MB of RAM), and there’s no slowness on there, either. The only limitation that I’ve encountered it that I can’t watch HDTV Quicktime movies — that requires a G5.

  3. It’s good to hear that the extra RAM made such a big difference! I have a similar setup (G4, 1.25 GHz, 512 MB RAM), and I’ve started to notice sluggish behavior when I have a lot of crap open. Maybe doubling the RAM is the answer.

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