Mac OS X Leopard is 64 bit, and has the ability to address up to 4GB of RAM. And most people wonder, do they really need that much RAM? Well, it completes depends on what you do.
If you use virtual machines, then the 4GB of RAM is an almost must have. Of course, VMs will work without 4GB of RAM, but it cuts off your Mac’s memory by a LOT, and forces your Mac to use the swap(which is when a bit of the hard disk is used as memory) which is much slower than your real memory.
To show you an example of this, here is a picture with me running Mac OS X without Virtual Machines open.
Ass you can see, the swap is 0, and the only applications I have open are normal everyday applications that anyone who has a Mac would use. Now, I’m going to open Windows Vista with those same applications open.
As you can see, the amount of free RAM dropped like a bullet and the Swap became approximately 3MB. And this is Windows Vista running with 512MB of RAM, which you may or may not know is rather bad for Windows Vista. Of course, thanks to Parallels and Mac OS X, it runs faster than if on a PC with 512MB of memory, but it’s still not something you want to run Windows Vista with. Anymore RAM than this would kill the rest of your RAM, and Windows Vista is recommended with 1GB of RAM. Windows XP runs with 512MB, but it’s also better to have 1GB for performance.
Another thing you may want to use 4GB for is Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac. You may be wondering, why would you need 4GB with that? Well, anyone who looks at their RAM normally will know that Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac consumes a lot more RAM than other applications in OS X. If you look at the 2 activity monitors I have open up there, you’ll see that Word is near the top of the list, yet at that time, I was just putting Word in the back while using the internet. If you use Word, Excel, and Powerpoint commonly, you may want to get 4GB just in case. After all, if you look above, Word consumes about 200MB. Thats 600MB with the three applications open, which is about the size Windows Vista is taking up.
Developers definitely should get 4GB, since they may want to test their software out with Windows and Linux. Rebooting your Mac all the time is quite troublesome. And once you open a Virtual Machine, even after you close it, the swap remains. You’d have to reboot to get rid of it, which makes the point of the Virtual Machine, pointless.
According to some sites, the new MacBooks can apparently address up to 6GB of RAM. What does that mean? That means you could run Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Mac OS X and split 2GB to each. The more ram you have, the more capability you have for running Virtual Machines.
And right now is an excellent time to buy RAM if you’re using a previous generation MacBook, MacBook Pro, or iMac. There are two reasons for that: 1 because it’s the holiday season and 2 because Apple recently switched to DDR3 RAM. That means that soon, everyone will be buying DDR3 and DDR2’s prices won’t be as high anymore. Although, if you want to upgrade your new MacBook or MacBook Pro to 6GB of RAM, you’ll be spending quite a bit compared to those of us using DDR2 RAM.
If you are wondering what a Virtual Machine is, then I shall explain it. A Virtual Machine is basically an Operating system, Windows or Linux, that runs within a host computer and uses that computer’s memory, cpu, gpu, etc. For example, if you had a Mac, you could virtualize Windows XP, and have Windows XP and Mac OS X running side by side. And to do this, you’ll need software. There are 3 major vendors for Macs for doing this: the free option is Virtual Box. It’s an excellent piece of software, especially because it’s free. The only few things it may lack are dragging files from OS X to your VM, and also it is a bit funky when doing expose. However, there are other options, such as Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion. These two are more than capable of using expose perfectly, dragging files, and other features that virtual box doesn’t offer. However, remember that they both cost 80 dollars each, whilst Virtual Box costs nothing.
Anyways, hope you enjoyed, and make good use of this.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: 10.5, 2000, 3g, 4gb, 6gb, Apple, fast, interesting, iphone, leopard, linux, macbook, memory, new, os x, parallels desktop, pro, ram, ubuntu, virtual machine, virtualbox, vmware, windows vista, xp
With 64 bits you can address more than 4GB, with 32 bits only 4GB or less.
Well, 64 bit systems can address up to 128GB of RAM, but 32 bit systems can only address about 3.5GB. Some people get 4GB with 32bit systems anyways because they want dual channel memory.