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What you can do with 4GB of RAM

C

cs157

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 17, 2009
3
0
One of my first purchases after my new unibody Macbook 13" was 4GB of RAM from Newegg and a 7200 RPM hard drive. That sure seems like a lot of RAM so I wanted to see how many programs I could run before it brought down the system.

With most of my Applications open (61 not counting the finder) I still had about 1GB of free RAM (between actual "free" memory and "inactive" memory). Expose switching was still responsive and whenever I had a program active it was *almost* as responsive as if it were the only program running. There was also a small increase in the idle state of both CPU cores. I tried rapidly switching between several programs and could not get one of them to crash. I would like to see someone with a Windows box try this and see how responsive their system is. I absolutely love the build quality of this computer, not to mention the excellent OS X and iLife software.

I'm trying to convince my wife to make the switch; however she's holding on fast to her Windows world (as she sits across the room mumbling how much she hates Vista and IE8). :)

Screenshot (click for full size version):


C
 
Here is my attempt, I don't have many apps. lol

Picture4.png


I also had over 600 tabs, and it didn't even batter a eyelid!
 
Vista and XP would throw up all over themselves if you tried something like that.
 
cs157 said:
One of my first purchases after my new unibody Macbook 13" was 4GB of RAM from Newegg and a 7200 RPM hard drive. That sure seems like a lot of RAM so I wanted to see how many programs I could run before it brought down the system.

With most of my Applications open (61 not counting the finder) I still had about 1GB of free RAM (between actual "free" memory and "inactive" memory). Expose switching was still responsive and whenever I had a program active it was *almost* as responsive as if it were the only program running. There was also a small increase in the idle state of both CPU cores. I tried rapidly switching between several programs and could not get one of them to crash. I would like to see someone with a Windows box try this and see how responsive their system is. I absolutely love the build quality of this computer, not to mention the excellent OS X and iLife software.

I'm trying to convince my wife to make the switch; however she's holding on fast to her Windows world (as she sits across the room mumbling how much she hates Vista and IE8). :)

Screenshot (click for full size version):


C
Click to expand...

Which HD did you get, I am thinking of upgrading mine to 500gb
 
Picture3-2.png


you can do a lot. plus it's so cheap to upgrade - especially now that the DDR3 RAM has dropped.

an easy way to add more windows is besides opening every program - you can just right click finder and safari, and camino and sunrise and select - open new window.
 
RDM3 said:
Which HD did you get, I am thinking of upgrading mine to 500gb
Click to expand...

I went with the Seagate Momentus 320GB 7200RPM hard drive, model: ST9320421AS. I got it for around $100 on sale at Best Buy; however you can find it online cheaper. I originally bought a Western Digital drive with the same specs but it made a very loud clicking noise every 20 or 30 seconds and was generally louder than the stock drive (I hear this is normal, but i bugged the crap out of me, so I returned it).

I did some more research on the power draw of the higher-RPM hard drives and found the Seagate was the closest to the stock drive. I've been using it since without any issues or problems and it appears to make the system more responsive, especially during disk intensive tasks like spotlight searching.

C
 
I have the Unibody 2.4 and I did the same thing but I used small music videos, I counted 88 b4 it slowed down, but that was an avg of 30-40mb each.

I tried opening 4 apps on my Vista HP Notebook and a note came up and said

Are You Kidding Me, this is Microsoft Vista not a Macintosh try it again and I will Crash with a Non Recoverable Error :(
 
I had kernel panics with my MB so I decided to fill the memory by opening everything I could (even doom3 and Sims2) but the RAM is so well managed I could not get it to top out. In windows though this was easy I just opened notepad and calculator and it started paging almost immediately :)


I didnt think to get a screen grab though...
 
Wow. That's so cool. Right now my machine is struggling with just 1gig of RAM, so it makes me all that more motivated to upgrade!
 
Dumb question...
I just got a Macbook for the first time last week.
How are you guys taking those zoomed-out screenshots?
 
Press fn-F11 to use Exposé and show all the windows.

If you're using Leopard, press the spaces icon in the dock to show all the spaces. It might not be in your dock, in that case it will be in Applications.

To take the screenshot, press Command-Shift-3. This will save the whole screen to your desktop. Press Command-Shift-4 to select what you want to screenshot. Press Command-Shift-Ctrl-3 to save the whole screen to your clipboard, and Command-Shift-Ctrl-4 to save your selection to your clipboard. Whilst using Command-Shift-4(-Ctrl) you can press the space bar to save images of certain.
 
Press fn-F11 to use Exposé and show all the windows.
Click to expand...
Cool...thanks for getting me on the right path. It was actually fn-F9 on my keyboard to show all the windows.
 
One Oracle instance can use all your RAM without even launching an app in Finder.

I doubt anyone is buying 4GB of RAM to run 48 applications at once. It is usually one or two apps that need more memory than usual.
 
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