This may be a long post, hopefully you'll find it amusing, or interesting. But let me know what you think. I also have a question...
Since 2000 I've been using a Pismo laptop with 400mhz, 6gig HD. Over the years I upgraded the RAM to 256megs, added an airport card, and replaced the screen when it cracked a few years ago. Since about 2005 the battery died completely, so I through it away to get rid of some weight; since then I've been tied to an outlet and had a hole on the left side!
I've always run the most recent version of Mac OS X. Currently this means tiger, but I deleted all the i-apps because they were too slow to be useful. Safari runs okay but chokes with more than a few tabs. I have to reboot regularly because the system uses my HD as virtual memory, but runs out quickly because the HD is so small. When this happens, I also can't save any of my work because there is literally 0 megs free space, but I've used a flash drive to work around this problem.
In spite of all the shortcomings of using a 20th century machine in the 21 century, my pismo has been remarkably durable. The thing keeps chugging along, slowly, and gets the job done. My brother has an external firewire drive, and it can even play DIVX movies without too many hiccups. I was surprised it had the processing power to decode them.
Yesterday I relented and bought a new white macbook. I upgraded the RAM to 2gigs and the HD to 160gigs. I chose it because it has better specs (RAM) than the baseline blackbook and is cheaper as well.
So here's my question: I'm really excited about my first new computer of the in 7 years. I'm curious... how much of a speed boost do you think I'll get? I know I'll finally be able to use iphoto and itunes, and I'm sure the boost will be noticable. But really, what are we talking about?
Thanks for the input.
Since 2000 I've been using a Pismo laptop with 400mhz, 6gig HD. Over the years I upgraded the RAM to 256megs, added an airport card, and replaced the screen when it cracked a few years ago. Since about 2005 the battery died completely, so I through it away to get rid of some weight; since then I've been tied to an outlet and had a hole on the left side!
I've always run the most recent version of Mac OS X. Currently this means tiger, but I deleted all the i-apps because they were too slow to be useful. Safari runs okay but chokes with more than a few tabs. I have to reboot regularly because the system uses my HD as virtual memory, but runs out quickly because the HD is so small. When this happens, I also can't save any of my work because there is literally 0 megs free space, but I've used a flash drive to work around this problem.
In spite of all the shortcomings of using a 20th century machine in the 21 century, my pismo has been remarkably durable. The thing keeps chugging along, slowly, and gets the job done. My brother has an external firewire drive, and it can even play DIVX movies without too many hiccups. I was surprised it had the processing power to decode them.
Yesterday I relented and bought a new white macbook. I upgraded the RAM to 2gigs and the HD to 160gigs. I chose it because it has better specs (RAM) than the baseline blackbook and is cheaper as well.
So here's my question: I'm really excited about my first new computer of the in 7 years. I'm curious... how much of a speed boost do you think I'll get? I know I'll finally be able to use iphoto and itunes, and I'm sure the boost will be noticable. But really, what are we talking about?
Thanks for the input.
