Ram Question....

F

FallOutBoyx530

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Well..so far I've been able to use OSX pretty well. So now for the hardware...what advice or what size would you guys prefer for me? a college student with a 1.25ghz ibook g4?

I was just thinking about adding 256MB to make it 512MB but not sure, what would you guys/gals recommend? thanks. Pss. I don't play games on the mac except internet yahoo game or some sort.

Still new with laptop overall...I know that more ram speeds up the computer but does it lower the temeprature of the laptop? because the cpu dont work as hard ...?

Expanding the thought....how much ram would I need if I was to play games? like Halo, World of Warcraft or some 3D games?

Thanks for the Help :eek:
 
Additonal RAM won't provide any benefit unless you need it. Most people can stand to have at least 512 MB in an iBook. Heavy game playing would require more.
 
There are benefits, if you use many applications at once, or actually require that RAM. If you are just surfing the web, or using Word then 512 MB of RAM will be enough. On the other hand, if you're running some simulations that take loads of RAM, more RAM will help. Image and video editing are also notorious for requiring more RAM.

Unless you're a power user, 512 MB of RAM should be enough for you. But if you can afford 1GB, why not? ;).
 
Thanks for clearing everything up. Well...the book itself cost me 1k which is my summer money but I have not decided to buy rams yet, so perhaps when i save enough I might. =)
 
As said, there are no benefits unless you need it. Are you having many, or excessively long spinning, beachballs? Are you having obvious system slowdowns. Yes, well, OK, buy more RAM. There is no way to guess how much additional RAM would benefit you without knowing what you plan to do. If you need a reason for buying 1 GB, well, then, as implied above, RAM is cheap so why not max out. You could even buy generic from Outpost.com. That's what I use. If generic is good out of the box, then it should last well. And, Outpost is excellent on returns within the proper period.
 
I would also suggest that you dont get more unless you need it. My Mac mini will freeze when running 5 or more applications, espcially will slowdown when running 2 or more iLife apps, which results in many Finder beachballs. http://www.crucial.com sells RAM :)
 
More RAM is always better. The way that OS X works, if you have 256 or less, you are working almost always from Virtual Memory, which makes things slow.

I recommend at the very min 512 for anyone, even basic users. It gives a nice performance boost when using the machine. But you would be better served with more if you can afford it. Like said above, get what you can afford, its cheap!
 
Robn Kester said:
More RAM is always better. The way that OS X works, if you have 256 or less, you are working almost always from Virtual Memory, which makes things slow.
Click to expand...
I agree that, with 256 MB, more RAM almost always is better. Still, it is not always better. For example, if all one does is read email and surf with one tab open, then 256 MB is very likely to be sufficient. I don't mean to pick on you, but the idea that more RAM always is better just doesn't hold true--it's an oft heard over generalization. What's true is that more RAM will improve performance only if performance is being degraded via a RAM shortage--which frequently is not the case.
 
OS X makes use of additional RAM as a sort of disk cache. Relaunching applications or opening documents that you have recently used (i.e. in the last few minutes) becomes much faster. Hence, even if you have over 1 GB of RAM, OS X will still mark most of it as used. Just 'inactive'.
 
Right, so having only a small amount of free RAM is not necessarily an indicator or a shortage. A shortage, and, thus, over use of virtual memory, is indicated by many, or long spinning, SBBODs and excessive pageouts.
 
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