[geeks] Anyone know of good sources of 5V DIMMs?

[nate at portents.com]

> OS 10.3 was dog slow on my 450mhz G4 Cube w/ 512mb of RAM. Alot of
> sitting around waiting for the computer to do anything. OS 9 was
> wonderfully zippy and responsive.

512MB is what I consider the bare minimum for OS X, which is why I'm
trying to find good sources of old, cheap 128MB memory.

Keep in mind what kind of computers I'm going to be upgrading - most of
these systems have a 180Mhz 604e with around 200MB of RAM and a 1.2GB hard
drive with Apple's old on-board graphics (4MB frame buffer), so even in OS
9 they're not speed demons.  A 32MB Radeon 7000 should alleviate a decent
amount of sluggishness by offloading some of the screen rendering to
OpenGL on the graphics card (I'd be curious what graphics card you had in
your Cube), and hopefully a 500Mhz G3 in OS X will feel at least as usably
fast for office apps as a 180Mhz 604e in OS 9 did.

> Putting 10.3 on upgraded PowerMacs with G3s is going to be so slow it
> will be almost unusable for anything. Why not just run OS 9?

There's one big problem with OS 9 - web browsers.  I'm not sure if you've
tried lately, but web sites have changed in ways that cause them to
basically not work on older web browsers like IE 5.1.7 and even the last
classic build of Mozilla 1.3.1 (which was pre-Firefox 1.0).  Significantly
contributing to the browser problem too is the now all-too-common use of
Flash applets/animations as ads on web sites, and Macromedia/Adobe haven't
updated the Flash plugin for OS 9 in a while AFAIK, and that alone is a
memory hog and I believe has memory leaking issues (made much worse by OS
9's memory management - I've had to deal with end-users there
misinterpreting out-of-memory error messages generated by web browsers
leaking memory until their partition is full as out-of-drive space
messages which they took to mean they should move document files to their
desktop, mistaking the desktop as a place that would somehow magically
free up 'memory', which had the side-effect of moving the Microsoft User
Data folder to the desktop as well, which caused Outlook Express to not
see any existing account/email data and present the user with a first-time
setup wizard when they launched it, etc. etc.)

Even though web browsing isn't really a big need at this little non-profit
company, it's enough of a need that it can have negative effects when it
doesn't work, especially when the negative effects spill over into their
ability to use other applications on the same computer.  The only way I
can get them a modern browser is with a modern OS.

- Nate