The Tempramental Princess

By Jerry Pournelle

December 22, 2003

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Column 281 (Continued from the Previous Week)

The Mac I bought came with 512 MB memory. In Glendale they don't have any more memory to sell me (waited five minutes to find that out) but it will cost about $200 (waited another five minutes to find that out as the salesgirl went back to the back room yet one more time). I am assuming I will want to put this up to a full gig. It holds 2, it says on the box. I have asked Kingston and Crucial what kind of memory packages they have for this machine, and both have responded: I'll try both, but my experience has been that anything sold by either of those two will be more than satisfactory.

I already know I need more memory. If you are going to use a PowerBook with the new Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther) you will want at least a full gigabyte; less will condemn you to long periods of watching the spinning pinwheel known as "the beachball" (and sometimes "the Beachball of Death"). While that beachball is spinning you can't get much done even if this is a multi-tasking operating system—the GUI is generally non-responsive during these episodes, even though the underlying Darwin FreeBSD core is active (and indeed can via accessed remotely via ssh if one has enabled that option via the System Preferences utility). But you'd have to know to do that.

I have conflicting opinions from experts on whether or not more memory will tame down that beachball, but they all tell me that more memory is a good idea. It would only have been $200 to upgrade the system when I bought it, and I would have done it if I could. A better idea, though, would have been to buy the Mac with as little memory as possible and then fill it up with Crucial or Kingston memory bought on my own; that would have cost less. We'll get back to memory later.

First Date

Setting up the Mac isn't very hard, but there was a problem. I connected it to a vacant Ethernet port on one of the hubs on my system, so that it would get an address from DHCP, and shortly after the Mac was on the Internet.

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