I’ve been seeing the Mac’s “spinning beach ball of death” (as Merle coined the animated busy icon) a lot lately. My MacBook is about a year old, and upgrading the 1 GB RAM seemed like the answer.
Watching the Activity Monitor and reading some web pages on the subject led me a bit astray: my memory was mostly in use, though a good chuck was blue “inactive” memory, where OS X stores extra data instead of having to go back to the disk. In practice, switching between a few big tasks (growing Firefox session, Picasa running under CrossOver emulation) was overusing it.
A Macworld article on Upgrading RAM finally filled in the missing piece: watching the page in/out counter for pages being written out to disk. Mine was ticking off at a good clip, which sealed the case for upgrading to 2 GB of RAM. It was easy enough to install, and I’ve yet to encounter the beach ball after 5 days of regular use. In fact, my “inactive” memory has swelled to 1.2 GB, leaving about 150 MB truly free. Not bad for under $100.
August 17th, 2007 at 8:58 am
What kind of RAM didja get and where did you get it?
August 17th, 2007 at 4:10 pm
I bought two 1 GB Cosair chips at the local MicroCenter. They’re DDR2 667 Mhz (PC5300) 200-pin SODIMMs; System Information will tell you the type your Mac takes.