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Apr 4, 2006 7:40 PM in response to Gif J. Pegby TAV,The short answer is yes, but the long answer is maybe.
I believe this question is unique and appropriate considering the very young age of the Intel Mac and the availability of universal applications. Adding RAM is the easiest way to see increased performance on you machine. But at the same time, it depends on your PPC versus UB workload. If you are running UB memory hogs - and especially PPC memory hogs that have to emulate under Rosetta - than yes, additional RAM will decrease the amount of virtual memory needed and speed the user experience up a bit.
Ask yourself how many applications you've set to open at login. Figure out how much multi-tasking you do. Determine how long you are willing to wait for programs to open, etc.
My best advice is to open your Activity Monitor after a restart and 15 minutes of what you would consider normal (opening apps, etc) activity and check the page outs under the System Memory tab. Alot of people would suggest deleting PPC applications to keep things hopping. I disagree. Some of those PPC apps might be essential to your day-to-day life with your Intel Mac.
If the number of page outs (meaning your computer has to use the hard drive as virtual memory) number is 5000 or so, boosting memory will help your day-to-day experience in a way you can recognize. Otherwise, leave it alone.
That said - I started with the stock 512 and upgraded to 2G. And the reason I did that was to test the machine's "out of the box" capabilities and also to provide "real world" experience to others. Did the upgrade help me - yes. But I do enough intensive work on my machine to make the difference worth the money. It's an individual decision in my opinion, and should be based on the criteria I've outlined above.
You can bet that the "built to order" 2Gig people will pile on this thread, but unless they have experienced the machine at stock configuration as you and I have, their information is quite pointless as they have no reference and will only provide links and such to articles they've read. -
Apr 9, 2006 10:43 PM in response to Gif J. Pegby John Hickam,Has anyone else noticed Front Row being a Ram hog. I have the 1.83 Ghz iMac and it seems slow at times. I went into activity monitor and noticed front row takes up 90+ percent of the cpu. Wow. Any fix to this?