Re: Buying PB memory from PC store

In article <1156839002.008677.144050@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Arild P." <no-spam2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

KLK wrote:
I'm not sure what Apple means by "reverse" but the upper SODIMM
slot has that label. If you get no chimes and the "About This Mac"
command says 1.5 GB DDR2 SDRAM then your machine is happy with the
RAM.

Yes, I seem to have no problems (except the mentioned beachball), and
it does ideed say that I have 1.5 GB of RAM in my machine.


As for your beachball, you need to provide more details. We can't
evaluate the problem without knowing when it shows up. You CAN
check to see if you have memory problems by opening the
Activity Monitor from the utilities folder and checking the
System Memory tab. Look at the "Free" category and the
Page ins/outs during the beachball events. If the Free category
is greater than about 150 MB and the Page ins/outs stays fairly
constant then you have enough memory.

Yes, both actions are like you say. The "Free" category shows around
920 MB at the moment, and I'm running several programs at once
including the Seamonkey web-browser and Photoshop elements 2. Both
pretty memory hungry applications as far as I know.


Remember, as fast as computers are, there are operations that
take time. Even worse, programmers (myself included) now fairly
routinely assume that they don't need to spend a lot of time
conserving CPU cycles and memory because you have plenty of both!

Yes, I understand that, but I've been following threads about slow
Macs, and everybody replies that the person should install more memory
as it makes a day/night difference in terms of speed. I've noticed
nothing of the sort.

I don't know much about interpreting the activity monitor, but there is
a field called "VM size" which I assume stands for "virtual memory";
the space on the hard drive which the computer uses as "fake RAM". It
stands at around 6.27 MB right now, but when I now have a full 1.5GB of
RAM, why on earth should the computer resort to the (slow) hard drive
for memory?
I have a feeling that the beachball shows up whenever the computer is
using its virtual memory (which seems to be pretty often).
Is there any way to turn this off, or configure it for better
performance? I'm not too impressed right now, and was expecting more
from my 1.67GHz Powerbook G4.

I've got 1.5GB physical RAM in my 15" PB. Activity monitor reports 5.3GB
VM. My computer isn't slow.

What you're really interested in is the report below VM: pageins/outs.
That tells you how many times the OS has paged something in from VM to
physical RAM and out from physical RAM to VM. It's difficult to tell you
what the number _should_ be since it's just a counter and depends on
your uptime. However, if you notice the number of pageins/outs
increasing, while the beachball shows up, then it's quite likely that
swapping to VM is your problem.

It might be helpful to just give all the numbers that Activity monitor
is reporting, or to look in the archives for this group for information
about these numbers. There have been discussions about how much free RAM
you should have relative to your active RAM, and etc. If you can't find
them, maybe I can remember a thread name or something.

HTH

--
Later,
John

johajohn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

'indiana' is a 'nolnn' and 'hoosier' is a 'solkk'. Indiana doesn't solkk.
.

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