When you’ve been running OS X with a single gig of ram for the entire time you’ve ran the operating system you start to believe that things are just inevitably slow. Well, I finally went out and got two extra gigs of ram for my laptop, giving it a total of three gigs. Holy flying hippos this computer is fast. The first thing I noticed was about thirty seconds off the boot time. This pretty much cut my boot time in half.
One of the first things I had to try with the newly added memory was virtual machines. One of the things I’ve disliked about parallels and vmware fusion was the speed. As it turns out all that was needed was more RAM. I can now run several different virtual machines at the same time. I now normally have at least two VMs running; debian as a test server and Vista or XP for various applications.
If you think that your computer is running kind of slow I would suggest maxing out the RAM. The only thing that upsets me about adding the memory is the fact that i waited over six months to do so. It is not even like replacing the memory in the macbook pro was difficult, I believe the total downtime for me was under ten minutes. Five of which was searching around for the right size of screwdriver.
