[sphinx]

I have a G5 Dual 1.8 and it has 1.25GB of ram in it right now. It seems that OS X just love to eat up the ram and use it all. I was just wondering how much ram I would have to put into the system so that I always have a good buffer of ram left..

Also I do find the G5 to be fast but I'm a little disapointed on certain things. Would a 10k drive speed things up a great deal and will the next incarnation of OS X speed things up even more?

[Chinasaur]

There are many good threads re: RAM usage in OS X...search and read up. It's really good to educate yourself about this subject.

Essentially, RAM usage is not what you are thinking it is. Having a small amount of Free RAM, and lots of Used RAM is not a bad thing for many reasons.

1.25 is a good amount of RAM unless you work with multi-hundred megabyte files and have many, many apps open.

[Cincinnatus]

sphinx,

Could you elaborate on the nature your disappointment with "certain things?"

As for memory management, try this document for starters.

/Cincinnatus

[yfan]

the 10K hard drive and the ram will speed up different things. The amount of ram really deals with what you are working with. Photoshop, for instance can only use 2gb of ram where as something like combustion will work with all that is allocated to it. The 10K drives will speed up other things. Encoding for instance will be significantly faster with the raptors. My 1.8 dp boots up in a about 20 seconds from the moment it chimes. Video access time and rendering times for FCP are a lot faster too.