Memory, Sweet Memory...

Wednesday, 30 March 2005

Just added a 512M module to the Powerbook for a total of 1G (was 768M), for a pittance — $79! — courtesy of Amazon.

Everything’s much snappier, especially Eclipse; I feel more productive already. If you have an Aluminum Powerbook, now’s the time…

P.S. — Virtual PC is actually usable now; not fast, mind you, but the start and shutdown times are bearable, and it’s reasonable responsive.

5 Comments

Simon Willison said:

I’m in pretty much the same situation - I’m currently at 768 MB, things are getting a bit sluggish and I’ve been considering a RAM upgrade. There are two things holding me back. Firstly, I wasn’t sure if buying another 512 MB module (taking me up to 1 GB) would give me much of a boost, so I was considering a 1 GB module instead. It sounds like the 256 MB increase does make a noticable difference.

Second (and more importantly), my battery life at the moment is pretty terrible; I only get about an hour and a half. Have you noticed if increasing the RAM decreases the battery life at all? I’ve heard RAM can be a bit of a power drain but I’ve never seen any numbers.

Wednesday, March 30 2005 at 9:08 AM

Mark Nottingham said:

It’s very much worth it; I don’t notice any difference in battery life, but it’s early to say. Given that I have the same number of sticks, I wouldn’t think it’d be much different.

Hmm, the Amazon price has gone up to $83.99; it was $79.99 for a very brief time.

Thursday, March 31 2005 at 8:08 AM

Manfred Stienstra said:

There’s a very simple way to see how much extra memory you need. Just look at the amount of swap space the OS is using, and make sure it doesn’t have to.

Thursday, March 31 2005 at 11:47 AM

Patrick Calahan said:

Wow, $80 is pretty darn cheap.

I bought a gig stick from

http://www.4allmemory.com/search/apple/powerbook.cfm?q=Apple+PowerBook+G4+1.5GHz+15+Inch+Display

several months back and have been very happy w/it.

Thursday, March 31 2005 at 11:48 AM

Simon Willison said:

Manfred: any idea how to do that on OS X? Activity Monitor tells me that my VM size is 7.96 GB, but I’m not about to stick 8 GB of RAM in my PowerBook (even if it was possible)! Am I looking at the wrong number?

Sunday, April 3 2005 at 1:50 AM

mark nottingham