Memory Madness

Although it's been well known that the price of computer memory continues to dip, historically the PC3200 DDR DIMM's my PowerMac G5 uses have remained stubbornly high. For some unknown reason it finally dropped to more affordable levels, so I bought two Crucial 1GB sticks for $83.

After installing them I now have a total of 3GB and my Mac couldn't be happier. OS X boots faster and memory hungry applications like Photoshop and Word load much quicker. The best part is I no longer hear my hard drive grind as it no longer pages memory to/from the disk.

I compared the various memory statistics Activity Monitor provides and can see proof that the benefits aren't imaginary. After a few hours testing my page outs is still zero while before it was half of my page ins. Free memory went from 12.75MB to a whopping 2.01GB.

So what's the moral of this story? OS X loves memory. Feed it as much as you can and it will reward you with awesome performance. I figure at least 2GB is where you should start and add more depending on your applications and workflow.