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Stardust · May 16, 2003, 02:45 AM

I've got an 17" imac 800 Mhz, with 256 ram
It seem to have an spinning wheel al the time, the performance is realy realy slow. This is geting very anoying...

Is a simple ram upgrade to 760 enough to fix this problem.
The imac looks great but working onit is an drag.....

hoping for some reasuring replies...

Marcel, Multimedia designer......

iT4c0 · May 16, 2003, 05:48 PM

I upgraded my imac 17" 800mhz from 512mb to 768mb. I do not see noticeble change but for sure it helps! I 256 is not enough just for OS X. and since you are a designer, u definitly need more ram!

O, and also, 800mhz version imac is only 133mhz memory. I like the new 1ghz version because it uses DDR ram....i think it helps a lot too...

Shikimo · May 16, 2003, 06:09 PM

You dont happen to have one or more peripherals--particularly a scanner, maybe even a canon scanner--running, do you? This hasnt happened to me, but I know lots of people who complained of impossibly slow imacs who screwed around with thier peripherals and fixed the problem. Sometimes it was an outdated driver--many times with a canon scanner, and occasionally a printer or digi camera of various makes--eating tons of memory, and sometimes the peripheral just needed to be unplugged to instantly return the machine to normal speed. Sometimes one port caused it and not another. You may already know this, but just thought I'd mention it.

Originally posted by Stardust:
I've got an 17" imac 800 Mhz, with 256 ram
It seem to have an spinning wheel al the time, the performance is realy realy slow. This is geting very anoying...

Is a simple ram upgrade to 760 enough to fix this problem.
The imac looks great but working onit is an drag.....

hoping for some reasuring replies...

Marcel, Multimedia designer......

iT4c0 · May 17, 2003, 02:39 AM

Originally posted by Shikimo:
You dont happen to have one or more peripherals--particularly a scanner, maybe even a canon scanner--running, do you? This hasnt happened to me, but I know lots of people who complained of impossibly slow imacs who screwed around with thier peripherals and fixed the problem. Sometimes it was an outdated driver--many times with a canon scanner, and occasionally a printer or digi camera of various makes--eating tons of memory, and sometimes the peripheral just needed to be unplugged to instantly return the machine to normal speed. Sometimes one port caused it and not another. You may already know this, but just thought I'd mention it.

that reminds me when I had the HP printer. My imac got extremely slow due to the bad driver. if you go to prosesor viewer and if hp communication is running and you might see it takes all the cpu powers. but I still think it is the ram that cause u the beach ball spinning.

Stardust · May 17, 2003, 09:36 AM

But i am on an airport network so maybe that will slow thinks down a bit because it probalbly has to check the connection.

So might i conclude that for just the system (osX 10.2.6) alone you need more then 256 RAM???

I already read that because of the way the system handels RAM it now and then swaps memory-tasks to a virtual-memory partition. When that happens the spinnig wheel kicks in.

dfiler · May 17, 2003, 12:17 PM

Get more RAM today!

It will make your computer go so much faster you'll hit yourself over the head, wondering why you didn't do it earlier.

There could be other problems with your computer causing it to run slowly. Yet, without more RAM, it wouldn't matter anyway because the 256mb of RAM is currently your performance bottleneck.

I would suggest a minimum of an additional 512mb.

Chimpmaster · May 17, 2003, 09:56 PM

I have a 700mhz g4 imac with 384mb ram, and it doesnt "chug" much at all.

Jaguar will take advantage of more ram, and you will disk swap less, meaning you are relying less on that 5400 rpm hd and more on that ram and cache, which will speed up operations for sure.

iT4c0 · May 18, 2003, 02:31 PM

Originally posted by Stardust:
But i am on an airport network so maybe that will slow thinks down a bit because it probalbly has to check the connection.

So might i conclude that for just the system (osX 10.2.6) alone you need more then 256 RAM???

I already read that because of the way the system handels RAM it now and then swaps memory-tasks to a virtual-memory partition. When that happens the spinnig wheel kicks in.

Nooooo! I have airport installed on my imac as well. It does not matter! The ram are so cheap right now go grab an 256 or 512. I swear you will see the big difference.