[rescue] The best 'rescue' workstation

[Nathan Raymond]

On Sun, 24 Apr 2005, Bill Bradford wrote:

> My iMac G5 17" (1.8Ghz, 1G RAM) is one of the nicest machines I've ever 
> used.  If it's a system with only the factory 256M of RAM, that's the 
> reason it's slow - 512M seems to be the "sweet spot" for OS X.
>
> I've got 512M in both of my 1.25ghz Mac minis, and they're *really*
> usable.

Agreed.  My 1.47Ghz G4 (Digital Audio) with 1.5GB RAM and 1.0Ghz iBook G4 
with 1.25GB RAM are quite snappy.  When I first got the iBook, I suffered 
with 256MB of RAM while waiting for prices to fall on the 1GB upgrade - it 
was painful, running more than one application at a time with only 256MB 
slowed the machine to a crawl.  Blame double-buffering windows with AGP 
texturing (all windows are OpenGL textured polygons under Quartz Extreme 
on AGP systems) for the massive memory usage, but with RAM so cheap these 
days (1GB PC3200 DDR400 down to $100 now, 1GB SO-DIMMs down under $150) 
it's not so bad, just make sure you have at least 1GB of RAM.

- Nate