[Hidden-tech] little rant about OSX

[Steven Aronstein]

In my experience both SSD and RAM are vast (and often critical)
improvements.

There's no question that maxing out your RAM is often necessary if you run
enough apps, and that too little RAM can mean a computer will barely
function. Just time passing while you own a computer means updated apps,
higher bandwidth activities, and the general proliferation of data and
communication are going to increase your RAM needs even if you don't
upgrade the OS.

And hard drives are not only painfully slow (and terribly unreliable -- I
finally replaced every HDD I could afford to with SSDs after my 4th or 5th
hard drive corruption; the money was better spent keeping all my data AND
having faster performance than spending on data recovery services) but
since they are so unreliable and prone to degradation, it's likely some
performance issues will occur above and beyond inherent slowness because
the hard drive is corrupted or dying.  Regardless, it's hard to marginalize
the performance improvement when a computer goes from taking 1-2 minutes to
boot with a hard drive to 15 seconds with an SSD -- just as an example.

Basically, you can barely run a computer if it needs more RAM; and if
you're waiting forever to load or save programs or files and you hear the
hard drive working a lot -- an SSD will be a huge improvement.



The thing is, RAM is really cheap now.  Most Macs can max out their RAM for
$100 or less.

And SSDs are almost the same price as hard drives now as well --
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3011199/storage/plummeting-ssd-prices-are-quickly-closing-in-on-traditional-hard-drives.html



And if your hard drive is dying or badly damaged, you'll need to replace it
immediately anyway -- and it makes almost no sense to buy a hard drive
anymore when you do that.  If you want to test that, you can run Disk
Utility and look for red warnings about node damage; or even better run
Prosoft Engineering Drive Genius, Micromat Tech Tool, or Micromat Checkmate
-- to check for bad blocks.

You can find out how maxed out your RAM usage is by looking at the Activity
Monitor app Apple includes on all Macs; or my preference is running the
much easier to understand free Memory Clean app -- it will show you how
much RAM you are using and how much is left, constantly in the menu bar
while you are using your computer.



I have taken old slow Macs and (1) increased the RAM; (2) then repaired the
hard drive and rebuilt its directories with Disk Warrior and copied that
over onto a newly installed SSD.  The performance improvements have often
been greater than what one could afford to pay for a fancier newer Mac.

Spending around $300 on these two things can basically give you a new
computer, so clearly my vote is for both RAM and SSD if you can afford it.

-Steve


On Wed, Mar 9, 2016 at 3:19 PM, Chris Hart, MyMacTech.com <
chris at chrishart.net> wrote:

>
>
>
>
> Unquestionably, with the kind of multi-app usage that's been talked about,
> more RAM is called for.  But more RAM alone won't work miracles.
>
> In my experience, SSD makes a much bigger difference in system performance
> -- even if the system is short on RAM.
>
> *Chris Hart*
>     * Computer Support & Technology Consulting*
> *        for Connecticut and Western Massachusetts*
> *            Tel: 860-291-9393 <860-291-9393>*
> *                chris at chrishart.net <chris at chrishart.net>*
> *                    http://www.MyMacTech.com <http://www.mymactech.com>*
>
>
>
> Sounds to me like insufficient RAM. Every program takes memory. SSDs
> speed up boot time, and file access, but that's not what your computer
> spends most of its time doing. Buy more memory.
>
> Dan
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Hidden-discuss mailing list - home page: http://www.hidden-tech.net
> Hidden-discuss at lists.hidden-tech.net
>
> You are receiving this because you are on the Hidden-Tech Discussion list.
> If you would like to change your list preferences, Go to the Members
> page on the Hidden Tech Web site.
> http://www.hidden-tech.net/members
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.hidden-tech.net/pipermail/hidden-discuss/attachments/20160309/1fbb40fe/attachment.html