June 9, 2003
Go speed racer.
I worked with someone a few years ago whose motto was along the lines of “…when something isn’t working, throw some more hardware at the problem.” I’ve been thinking about this statement during the last couple of weeks, and here’s why. As wonderful as most of my experience during the transition to OS X has been, not everything has been working according to my expectations. I’m not talking about all the bitchy little inconsistencies in the interface or the previously obvious features that have been moved somewhere and now can’t be found without digging blindly between the cushions on the couch. No, I mean fundamental things. Things like how fast applications launch or how quickly folders and files respond to a double-click and display their contents. The single most annoying factor about working in OS X — compared to performing the same basic tasks in OS 9 — has been the difference in the speed. I thought that maybe because I was constantly running a few Classic applications — most notably, my email client — that this may have had some impact of the performance of the system. But if there was any difference in the speed or response of native applications when the Classic environment was out of the picture, I couldn’t tell. Sure, some of the third-party utilities I’ve installed to add back some lost OS 9 functionality have probably contributed a bit of extra gunk around the edges, but not so much as to have to continually wait for windows to refresh or applications to switch to the front. And so, I decided to throw some more hardware at the problem. Hardware in the form of a couple of chunks of memory. To be precise, I added another gig worth to the apparently measly 512MB that shipped with my box. The cost was low enough to be ridiculously affordable and the gain in performance has been nothing short of amazing to the point of being obnoxious. Applications that used to take 3 or 4 dock bounces to launch, are now ready to roll in a single jump of the icon. I knew that OS X loves memory, but I never expected anything this dramatic. Colour me pleased. Colour me efficient. Colour me almost completely happy — except for those bitchy little inconsistencies in the interface. I’ll just have to cover those another time.
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