We Can All Get Along
April 14, 2007My iMac G5 has, or should I say, had, 512 megs of ram. Then, I recently acquired a PC. The PC is great for running simulations (games) such as Microsoft Flight Simulator, and GTR: a driving sim. It’s more than great — it’s spectacular. It’s a very highly specced machine and the games are as smooth as silk.
The underlying OS which happens to be XP is horrible, but that’s of little concern. My setup is basically: Flying and driving on the PC, everything else on the Mac.
I noticed that the PC has 2 gigs of ram installed and I got to wondering whether that ram would work in the Mac. Turns out it does! I took out the Mac’s single piece of 512 megs and replaced it with the two 1 gig pieces from the PC and, as Steve would say: Boom. Instant transformation.
I should clarify that; it’s not like the Mac is suddenly much faster in everything it does. It is, however, much more relaxed at handling many tasks at the same time, and at re-launching applications. An example would be iPhoto, which always seemed such a resource hog before. I have a lot of very high resolution photos in iPhoto; in the past I’d wait about 15 to 20 seconds for it to launch from cold, and when I closed it there’d be quite a delay while it shut down.
Even after it shut down there was this almost subliminal drag on the rest of the system as if iPhoto was still holding onto some resources. Not now though. iPhoto now launches in half that time, and even if it does leave something cached in reserve when it quits, the gobs of available ram merely shrug it off.
Even after having several apps continually open, and having launched and used several others, iStat tells me that I’m still looking at 1 to 1.5 gigs of ram free. In the past that number would have been 100 to 200 megs free.
Maybe I don’t need a whole 2 gigs of ram, but I sure like the fact that I do.
Getting back to the PC, what happens now? Will it work with the Mac ram? Turns out it does, and not only that, there’s only a negligible loss of performance in the sims that I run; almost none at all.
The OS wasn’t too thrilled though. Just swapping out the ram caused it to ask for re-activation. This pissed me off because I’d vowed to never connect the thing to the internet — fearful of all those viruses and Trojans and all…
Once I’d set up the modem and fought my way through all those pop up warning bubbles and dialog boxes, it accepted my mods and re-activated itself. So now, best of both worlds.
My next Mac will probably be an intel with XP running inside Boot Camp in order to have all this goodness inside one gorgeous machine. I can picture myself being happy with that setup — XP being banished to a separate partition and a separate booting session; if it were running within OS X as with Parallels, I think I’d be continually nervous that it might leech over and infect the Mac side somehow.
It’s creepy enough just having its ram.
