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Mac Musings

Back on the Low-End TiBook

Dan Knight - 2003.06.19 - Tip Jar

Apple has got to stop shipping computers with ridiculously low amounts of memory. 128 MB simply isn't enough RAM to give OS X breathing room, let alone let the user have several applications open and switch among them efficiently.

Mac OS X is remarkable in that it can use virtual memory, but with a pedestrian hard drive, swapping files between RAM and the hard drive is a slow, cumbersome process. One of the best things Apple could do to kill the perception that X is slow is to ship every Mac with a minimum 256 MB of memory.

Anything less will bolster OS X's reputation as a slow OS when the real problem is often too little physical memory.

Stepping Back

I found out about that the hard way. The 512 MB module I purchased from Coast to Coast Memory turned out to be defective. Sometimes I could run the eMac for an hour or two before it just locked up - the clock stopped changing and it refused to accept a forced restart command (cmd-opt-esc) from either the wireless keyboard or an old iMac keyboard I plugged in.

Over the course of Wednesday things only got worse. By the end I could barely reboot the eMac without it going into a kernel panic, stopping while loading the OS, or not even getting to the point of displaying the smiling folder icon.

Pull the memory (which was remarkably hot) - problem vanishes. So our low-end eMac has lost 80% of it's memory, dropping from 640 MB to 128 MB. And that's just not enough memory to be productive when you're running a dozen apps at once - and half of them in classic mode.

So I'm back to the low-end 400 MHz TiBook, the slowest PowerBook G4 model Apple ever produced, and because it has 512 MB of memory, I can work more efficiently on it than on the memory challenged 700 MHz eMac. That's frustrating, because I was just getting used to the eMac's speed and big 1280 x 960 display.

Moving Forward

One thing I did Wednesday night was install Retrospect on the TiBook, connect an external 80 GB FireWire drive, and start doing backup within OS X. Throughput for the first drive I backed up was about 110 MB/min. using data compression. I expect to see better performance when this task moves to the eMac.

This morning I backed up a second partition in the background, and throughput was about 70 MB/min. - not bad at all considering how much work I was doing and how little impact Retrospect had on that work.

More RAM

I recalled that we had ended up with a spare SIMM when we upgraded our beige G3, so I scrounged it up, saw that it was PC100 on the label, and installed it on the eMac. The eMac now has 192 MB of RAM, and that should make a noticeable improvement, although I don't have time to use the eMac this morning.

Now it's off to the Post Office to mail the bad RAM back to Coast to Coast, and then off to the camera shop. Hope to test the eMac more tonight and report back tomorrow.

Dan Knight has been using Macs since 1986, sold Macs for several years, supported them for many more years, and has been publishing Low End Mac since April 1997. If you find Dan's articles helpful, please consider making a donation to his tip jar.

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