Speed difference b/t 512 and 1GB on mini?

[anthonymoody]

How much of a difference would you feel and where/when would you feel it? I ask b/c while in general I find the speed of my mini (1.42, 512) fine, there are occassions where I see the spinning beach ball more than I'd like - usually when I have a bunch of apps open, switching windows with expose frequently (particularly when one of them is Virtual PC), etc.

Now that it seems like 1gig sticks for the mini have been successfully installed and are not overly expensive, if it'd speed me up noticeably I'd consider it.

TIA,
TM

PS - I posted this earlier but it seems to have disappeared...

 

[feakbeak]

I'm curious too

I am wondering the same thing and just mentioned it in another thread. I ordered my 1.42 GHz mini with 512 MB because I didn't want to pay Apple's price for the 1 GB stick. Most reviewers said 512 MB was the sweet spot. I'm planning on running Safari, Mail, iChat and iTunes nearly constantly and will be using iPhoto fairly often too.

I understand if the mini is out of RAM when running VPC as you need to allocate a large chunk of your memory to the VPC image. Although, I'm able to run a VMWare session on my current PC with 512 without too much a performace hit... but you definitely feel it.

If anyone has used a mini with both 512 MB and 1 GB please post your thoughts. Although I'm guessing most upgrade to 512 MB from Apple or left it at 256 MB and upgrade to 1 GB themselves.

If 512 MB gets to be a little slow for my tastes, I'll upgrade it to 1 GB myself.

 

[Mechcozmo]

1 GB will help. It will allow you to do quite a bit more, as well as have more RAM to give to VPC.

 

[anthonymoody]

Re: VPC I recently had to increase the RAM allocation from 192 to 256 b/c it wouldn't let me drag and drop files back and forth otherwise (which seemed like a strange reaction to me but what do I know?)

Anyway, would love to hear experienced users' thoughts on the 512n1gb question.

Thanks,
TM

 

[numediaman]

It's all about beach balls. That is, you shouldn't notice much difference until you suddenly see that damn beach ball turning while applying a Photoshop filter, or working with the fourth open application.

I received my mini this morning -- it has 512 RAM. So far so good. 1 gig is ALWAYS best -- but I would agree that the 1.42 GHz machine with 512 RAM is the "sweet spot".

 

[fsck3r]

I have the 1.25 GHZ Mini with 512MB of ram. What is the normal mem usage? I dont like when I open activity monitor and it shows that Im almost out of ram is that common? Ill be surfing the net and maybe workin and iphoto and it will show only like 86 MB of RAM free. Am I just paranoid because my PC has 1 GIG of ram and it NEVER drops under 750 MB Free memory.