Powerbook fun

OK - so, my 17" powerbook G4 came with 512mb memory standard. The machine felt slow... and watching the output of "vm_stat 2" in a console window explained why - it was paging!

Today, I dropped in a 1gb DIMM, so the box now has 1.5gb of memory. Yowza - what a difference. The machine feels faster, and vm-stat(1) indicates that there's oodles of free pages left.

I think Panther - meaning the kernel, window system, and Finder, all want to have about half-a-gig to themselves. If you want to then do something like, say, actually DO WORK on the machine, or god forbid, run a java IDE, you definately want more than half a gig of RAM in the box.