01
Learning About Memory
I’m doing some further self-education on the way computer memory works. Partly because I’m most likely going to buy Apple’s Leopard OS in the near future for both of our machines, but also because of a conversation between me and a friend at work. I was talking to him about the possibility that I may have to get more RAM for the G5 I use, if I intend to use Leopard to its fullest. This led to a discussion on memory prices and a debate that memory for Apple’s machines cost around $400 per gigabyte. I disputed this because of my experience in installing my own RAM. I never remember memory being that expensive!
Well, it turns out that he and I are both correct. RAM is available in the Apple online store for $200 per GB. Keep in mind though that Apple charges more for comparable RAM chipsets that you can get elsewhere for quite a bit less. However, there is a catch to it, at least for me. For my machine, it’s highly recommended that RAM is installed in equal pairs. This is due to the “dual-channel” nature of the way my particular computer uses memory. Right now, I have two 512 MB modules installed. Because of dual-channeling, it works better than having just one 1 GB module installed. For more info on how this works, visit Apple’s technical documentation on this.
So, for me at least, this equates to spending $400 on RAM because memory doesn’t come in sizes in between 512 megs and 1 gig! I dont know my friend’s situation on his computer, whether it matters if memory is installed single on his computer, but this can potentially be a big deal for me. I’m prepared for the $129 for Leopard and maybe $200 for a new external hard drive (for Time Machine’s awesome backup capabilities), but twice the total for more RAM is just a bit hard to swallow.
The reason for the worry about RAM is that I did a test on my machine to see if I may need more memory. I put my iStat system monitoring widget front-and-center to see what’s going on with the memory and CPU usage. I opened up all the applications that I may need to use on a busy Saturday. These include: Mail, Safari, Firefox, Adium, Cyberduck and TacoHTML (for working on the bird club’s site) and iTunes (hey… no music, no work done!). Ok, still 130 megs of memory left, even with Dashboard active. Then I opened up VirtueDesktops, the third-party virtual desktop app, comparable to Spaces in Leopard. Whoa!! No memory left, and page outs to the hard drive went from 0 to over 2,000! And I wasn’t running any image editors I may need for editing the bird club’s photos! This is making me only hope beyond hope that Spaces is a better, less RAM intensive implementation than VirtueDesktops. If that’s not the case, then more memory may be a costly solution.
So, now that I know this, am I still going to get Leopard? It’s still a big possibility, but I’ll have to wait a bit and do research on memory requirements of its most-touted features like Spaces and Time Machine, which use Apple’s new Core Animation. Core Animation is a more powerful graphics API than has even been on any Apple OS, and it consequently may need more RAM for the system to fully utilize its potential. The saving grace in Leopard, for me, is the minimum requirements to run it, which is 512 MB. I use 1 GB of RAM, so hopefully that will be enough, as I’m sure that Apple’s software engineers accounted for the minimum requirements when designing Leopard’s apps.
In lieu of Spaces or VirtueDesktops, I still hide or minimize apps I’m not using at the moment. It may be more mouse clicks than simply switching desktops, but I manage quite well, thanks!
