Hi.

Second work week at the new job and its going well.  Plenty to keep me busy with.  Plenty to think about.  Plenty of choices to sift through.  Boredom won’t be on my radar for quite some time, if at all really.  In the end id rather be nose to the razor busy with tasks than bored.

Recently I noted to the new company that this macbook pro was SLOW on 1G of memory.  First time a full gig of memory wasn’t enough for a machine ive used.  I think it must be the mac bloat or something.  Ive used Ubuntu for years and gotten by fine with a gig or less.  Regardless, having only one gig would cause the mac to swap much to disk and thereby make things VERY slow.

Ive found that mac may be a fine desktop OS but not in terms of desktop responsiveness in a low resource state(1 gig of ram it seems).  The Linux kernel must kick the Mac OS kernels ass or something, perhaps Gnome as something to do with it as well but Linux can seem to get by on a lesser machine.  Not to say this laptop is lesser, its a 2GHZ dual core machine and 1G should have this machine do circles around a jet.  Needless to say, thats not the case.  I guess its not totally surprising mac really seems to bling out the UI quite a bit.  It just comes with the cost of needing more resources available.  Compound that with the fact that I am a power user and virtualize a few instances at once and it might make more sense.

All that said I purchased 4 gigs of ram for this machine and it flies.  Initial startup is slow but once everything is loaded its fast.  One thing operating systems do to “fake out” that they booted ultra fast is get the window manager loaded and still boot up the rest of the OS.  This basically makes the first minute or so of login slower than it should be.  Id honestly prefer to login when everything is finished loading.  I guess games need to be played with peoples minds about how fast an OS actually boots up so one OS doesn’t look bad.  Linux is starting to do this more, so I guess since everyone is doing it….

So there you have it, for power use, Mac OS seems good around 4 gigs.  Which is nut bag insane.

Pretty meet price.

**UPDATE** 4 gigs of RAM cost $89.