New to the everything, and a question

[Turd Ferguson]

hey guys/gals,

*What is the deal with the whole Virtual Memory thing? When is it good and when is it best to turn it off? I just got a useful Mac a few weeks ago. (had an ancient Quadra before that)

*Is there really a need for further upgrades at this point? I'm a grad. student, and here in the comp. labs the system specs are so amazing.....I seriously don't see a point in any upgrades for at least several years from now. We got the fancy new ones with the superdrives, HUGE harddrive space, insane speeds and all that jazz. I would assume the only people that would truly worry about upgrading at this point are those who work in video and 3d animation/modeling…

 

[strider42]

Re: New to the everything, and a question…

Originally posted by Turd Ferguson
hey guys/gals,

*What is the deal with the whole Virtual Memory thing? When is it good and when is it best to turn it off? I just got a useful Mac a few weeks ago. (had an ancient Quadra before that)

*Is there really a need for further upgrades at this point? I'm a grad. student, and here in the comp. labs the system specs are so amazing.....I seriously don't see a point in any upgrades for at least several years from now. We got the fancy new ones with the superdrives, HUGE harddrive space, insane speeds and all that jazz. I would assume the only people that would truly worry about upgrading at this point are those who work in video and 3d animation/modeling…

Virtual memory is best to avoid if possible. If your machine has gobs of ram, you can just turn it off. Some programs (older versions of photoshop from what I hear espcially) don't play with Vm well cause they use their own form of it. The problem with turning virtual memory off is that all your programs will take up more ram.

Of course, if you are using OS X, its a moot point. you can't turn it off in OS X cause it uses a different form of virtual memory. In that case, get as much ram as possible so the system should never have to use virtual memory.

As for the upgrade thing, all I can say is that my 233 mhz iMac works just fine for everything I do at the moment. I want a new machine, but certainly don't need one. But if my needs were slightly different (if I was into games, or high end graphics) I would definitly want a new machine.

 

[Turd Ferguson]

oh, a quick peek at what I can remember from this "new" machine I got...
PowerPC G3 ---um..350mHz, I think.
about 3 gigs left on the HD.(after I loaded some stuff on there...it probably was 5 or 6 gigs at first...)

Photoshop 5.5
Illustrator 9
------------
and that RAM disk icon....it shows up when I turn VM off...is that to be used as a folder or not, or what?

*btw...flat-screen monitors are sweeeeet (I'm going to miss working on these newer machines at the comp. lab)

 

[SilvorX]

Originally posted by Turd Ferguson
oh, a quick peek at what I can remember from this "new" machine I got...
PowerPC G3 ---um..350mHz, I think.
about 3 gigs left on the HD.(after I loaded some stuff on there...it probably was 5 or 6 gigs at first...)

yikes , u'll have to get a firewire hard drive sooner or later

 

[BikeDude]

VM

That's a good advice with OS X, you don't need to manually manipulate your virtual memory.
Just load OS X, and don't worry about a thing)

 

[strider42]

Originally posted by Turd Ferguson

and that RAM disk icon....it shows up when I turn VM off...is that to be used as a folder or not, or what?

I would just turn the ram disk off. Its most useful for laptop users to avoid using the hard drive (and thus saving battery life). It has a few uses for desktop users, but not all that many.

 

[Turd Ferguson]

Oh yah...forgot..I don't have OSX (yet)...I'm working with 9.2

Still...this has been much better than having a near-useless old Quadra in the house....I can actually do stuff!

Thanks for the tips...I'll turn RAM disk off then. This seems like a nice forum, btw...I've been cruising around a bit...