Wow, what an incredible difference a lot of memory makes! Yesterday, my employer finally delivered on a request for more memory my boss and I made in June for new (in June) PowerMac dual G5 desktop, that came with only 512MB of memory.
Don’t get me wrong, I am still of the opinion that 512MB is acceptable (1GB is better) for most things that most people do with computers (surf the internet, play some puzzle games, balance their checkbook, process digital photos, listen to music, write some letters or journals, play with spreadsheets, make presentations, read mail), and 512MB would have been barely enough for me at work except for an evil, but useful, Java application called Argus. It is internal to my employer, do don’t bother looking it up. It is a tool we use to monitor and graph metrics on many applications. It is a bloated pig, and when I tried to run it on my 512MB machine, I could reliably count on waiting minutes between each mouse click and change on a given graph’s view. Now, with 2.5GB installed – even Argus and Plucker Desktop move along at a respectable pace. The other bloatware application I used regularly was the Plucker Desktop, for fetching web content to my PalmOS handheld (kind of like Avant-Go, but open source); but I’d get around that by only running Plucker Desktop updates at night when I was not around to notice.
By the way, if you carry a small handheld around with you a lot, I recommend Plucker for PalmOS devices very highly. It enables you to snatch web content (I “pluck” BBC News and The Onion) automatically, store it on your handheld, then you can read offline whenever you have a few free moments.
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