[PhilB]

Since RAM prices are fairly low now I decided to upgrade my G4 450 with 128MB...so now I have 256 MB. I turned VM off--Wow! What a speed increase, at least in screen updates, file openings, etc. My question is: If 128MB is good, would 384 MB or 512 MB be even better? I don't do a lot of movie editing or graphics rendering (except for a few games<g> ). Should I stay with what I have now or go higher?

TIA

Phil Bennett
[email protected]

[wlonh]

stick with 256M, sounds like enuff for you and you won't get another boost from another 128M or 256M, at least nothing near what you have already gotten, if any increase at all...

and yes VM is a solution i find sorely lacking as you did, performance hits are no good and you will get a performance hit in one way or another if you use VM

i have never used VM for any length of time, and only to satisfy my curiousity as i have never needed it.

[Gregory]

One use for ram you might want to play with is to create a ram disk for your browser's web cache. 5-6MB is fine.

With 256MB the disk cache defaults to 8MB which is almost like having a ram disk (I can surf for quite a while before IE does a write to cache.waf file).

If you have money to burn, but I find that 256MB is 'nuf for what I do and have only very rarely maxed out. 128? Minimum for today's OS and apps.

Better off buying a 2nd drive for backups, video, or something.

The MacOS is extremely memory hungry, and it's cooperative multitasking and non-protected memory scheme leave other programs the same way. The experience i've had with photoshop, illustrator, bryce, poser, and cararra forced me to upgrade memory. With the 256 megs in the g4-400 i've seen an almost 1.5 hour decrease in render times over what i had in before i upgrade from 128. my thoughts, buy memory now, while the getting is good.