My recent trip to Edmonton was the heaviest use my iBook has seen as an actual laptop. Although it performed admirably enough, after getting back home and putting it back in its usual spot I noticed something was slightly off. One of the little rubber feet went missing somewhere along the way and now it rocks slightly when typing and slides a bit when opening the latch.
Although there are apparently replacement kits available, they’re awfully overpriced for silly little pieces of rubber. Ah well, at least it’s properly broken-in now…
The iBook also finally has an AirPort Extreme card now, and more memory. Lacking wireless on the trip wasn’t too big a deal since there was plenty of wired connectivity where needed, but it’s still nice to have the option. The memory upgrade (from 256 to 640 megs total now) is a far bigger improvement. Previously, running multiple apps (and there’s generally always at least Firefox in the background) would introduce long delays as it swapped its brains out, but everything is much more responsive now.
It’s too bad you didn’t live near an actual Apple Store (at least I don’t think you do) .. Out here, we can go in and they’ll just give you a little foot, if you’re missing one without charging you..
Jenn: As far as I know, there are no actual storefront Apple Stores (call centers, yes, however) in Canada — unless Toronto has one…
Cam: I will never cease to be amazed at how much of an overall performance improvement upgrading RAM alone makes to a Mac. PCs don’t see anywhere near as much increase, no matter how much memory you plug into them. My iMac, when increasing from the stock 128M to 256M, and then again from 256M to its’ current 512M was like buying two whole new machines… As for the Hammerhead… Hey. Who (or *what*) wouldn’t appreciate 1024M? ;-)
It depends on how the system is being used, really. When I upgraded my XP box from 512 megs to a gig, it made a *huge* difference in EverQuest, which needs to hold a lot of textures and geometry in memory when there are a lot of other players nearby. But if a system already has enough RAM to fit the working set and cache the most common files then adding more memory isn’t really going to have much of an effect. That’s pretty much true of any OS.
There *was* some serious brain-damage in Win98’s memory manager when you upgraded past a certain amount (they made some silly ‘oh a home user will *never* have that much RAM…’ assumptions), but the NT-derived line doesn’t suffer from it.
Odd you should say that, because I’d be inclined to say otherwise. NT itself (well, v4 at least) sure didn’t make any improvement jumps when some of the servers at Shaw’s old TVL had their RAM doubled or even tripled… I mean, nothing really noticeable.