[geeks] I'm part of the Mac Club now!

[alex j avriette]

> My TiBook/400 only has 256Mb, and it seemed ok until I got the G4/733 
> desktop with 640Mb of RAM. :) I think a lot of the speed difference is 
> the hdd speed, though - those little 2.5" drives aren't built for 
> speed. Once apps are loaded it's fairly snappy on the TiBook (until it 
> needs to read from the hdd again).

Um, I've got a 500. And while it's falling apart (lots and lots of hard 
use, back and forth from work, etc, for over a year now), its a great 
little machine. I basically use it as a "thin client" to all the other 
machines I connect to. I dont even have (for heavens sake!) vim 
installed on it. But it runs all my terminals for me just fine, and 
plays mp3s in a pinch (when im on the home network and have the 
fileserver mounted nfs over 802.11b). it also does Mail.app for me -- no 
mean feat, what with thousands of messages in imap folders -- just fine.

Youre right about the disk. Man, it is sloooooooow. Any time I need to 
do anything on the disk, its just pitiful. I've got 512mb of ram in this 
machine, but check this out:

PhysMem:  46.2M wired, 78.6M active,  239M inactive,  364M used,  148M 
free
VM: 1.79G + 49.4M   6090(0) pageins, 0(0) pageouts

(from top) apple allocates up to 3.5gb of swap on this machine. when 
your swap is on a disk as slow as this bugger, life hurts. a lot.

the other thing i noticed was when i was using it as a "test" database 
server. i.e., when i was writing database code on the subway on the way 
home and i needed a database. this machine has a LOT slower 
across-the-mobo IO. i mean just moving stuff from one place in memory to 
another is incredibly bad. when you bring the disk into the equation, 
sure, its a nice little terminal -- but i wouldnt want to do anything 
serious on it.

that having been said, in comparison to my vaio (p2/366) and my thinkpad 
(p2/300), it blows them both away and i happily caress and smooch my 
little powerbook all day long.

> MS "Windows Media Player for Mac OS X" (nice name) seems pretty much 
> useless - I haven't found an .AVI file it'll play yet. Perhaps it's 
> just for streaming MS formats? Bleah, at least make it play the same 
> formats as the one that ships with Windows.

bleh, yeah, i cant get divx to work either... and ive got all these damn 
invader zim episodes i want to watch too! :( (i can play divx fine, but 
there's no audio!)

alex

--
alex j avriette, perl hacker
avriettea at speakeasy.net
http://envy.posixnap.net/