I was doing some audio editing tonight, and found that my 17" PowerBook was chugging a bit, converting from AAC to AIFF. I've got 1Gb of RAM at the moment, as 1 SO-DIMM, so I can theoretically just buy another 1Gb of RAM and drop it in. But is it really worth it for £200+? Will I actually notice seriously better performance?
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Benefits of extra memory?
- Thread starter adriantoll
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jackieonasses
macrumors 6502a
The performance will not be as big as it would be from lets say, 512 to 1gig. It might make a difference on a dual Power Mac. But on a Powerbook, I doubt it would make a difference that is worth the price.
Sun Baked
macrumors G5
Go to Terminal and type in vm_statadriantoll said:
Look at pageouts... is it a big number?
Should be done after a normal session of use -- after a reboot (probably without sleeping).
Unless you have a high pageout number, you're most likely not resorting to having to use the VM Manager to much.
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Unless your seriously getting slammed by the VM Manager at a HD's 50MB/s bandwidth, then the boost you'd get by real memory's 1GB/s bandwidth (sustained G4) won't be there -- just something you may use every now and then.
~Shard~
macrumors P6
Was going to recommend the vm_stat as well, but Sun Baked beat me to it. In general, you can never have too much RAM, but with 1 GB in there already, you shouldn't be having too many issues doing what you're doing - it's not like you're doing 3D rendering and all that.
I always like recommending more memory to people since it's usually worth it and makes a noticeable difference, but a 17" PB with 1 GB RAM should be pretty fast as it is, so I'm not sure if there's another issue to cause your machine to chug... 😕
I always like recommending more memory to people since it's usually worth it and makes a noticeable difference, but a 17" PB with 1 GB RAM should be pretty fast as it is, so I'm not sure if there's another issue to cause your machine to chug... 😕
Thanks for your replies. Perhaps I'm just expecting too much! It doesn't seem to be having problems with anything else really, so I guess it's not worth the extra cash. I'll see how it goes...
~Shard~
macrumors P6
adriantoll said:
Yah, in your situation I would advise against getting the extra RAM its not like youre struggling with only 256 MB or 512 MB! Keep at it, but if problems persist, you may want to investigate further perhaps it isnt solely your RAMs fault, for whatever reason...
Sun Baked said:
I've got an iBook with 256 ram. How do i know if the pageout number if "high"? What's the guidelines?