Gimme some more
Normally I am very happy with my Macintosh (I have a 15,4″ MacBook Pro with 2.16Ghz Intel Core Duo – no Core 2 yet). Yesterday, however, I was about to get mad.
I was writing on my HA concept in Apple Pages, had a couple of Powerpoints and Excels open, iTunes with my favourite Music Videos, Skype to talk to Olli, Bjoern and Patricia (although she never really answers, so it’s more like a monologue), Firefox with some SAP Pages, Safari with a dozen or so info sites and iPhoto to check-in some digital photos via USB from my EOS 400D. This is a pretty normal workload for me, but as you can imagine, switching applications or opening new ones can get a bit slow.
Well, at least the system still does what I want and does not simply crush like others would – thanks to mach-kernel and FreeBSD backend.
Well anyway, I came to the point that I thought “Man, this is really taking some time now!” and then it happened! Bham(!) MS Word crashed. It’s always those MS apps that crash, never really happens with my other apps, just this bloddy MS Office. I checked top in the terminal to see paging behaviour and wow, the system was thrashing – desperately paging in and out trying to free space for my demands. I eventually had to close some websites and did not dare to open more than 5 Exvels a time this day.
Later when walking to my Hotel in Amsterdam Central, I came along an Apple shop – have never seen it there – and thought, well lets have a look. Hop in, up to the counter, put my MBP on it, smiling to the girl saying: “this one is in need of another gig of RAM”. “Well, hi there,” she replies “a pleasure, that’ll be 98EUR. Would u like us to put it in directly?“, Sure like hell I want you to do whatever you want!
5 minutes later my Book was at 2GB of RAM and we immediately gave it a test. MS Word 3 Documents, Excel 5 Sheets, Safari and Firefox a couple of pages each, iTunes, Pages, iPhoto, Skype and then that pretty girl sais, “Oh you got World of Warcraft?” – I usual have it in my Dock – “I love that game. What’s your character?, mine is a Dranei Hunter“.
Gee, she is a beauty. So here it goes, without even thinking I hook up to their Airport and fire up WoW. So now it’s like real stress test, all that apps still up and running and now WoW in window mode. But you probably already know, It worked flawlessly and fast!!! The only downside was that my Undead Mage was not at all able to impress that girl 
Maybe I should get some nicer looking character for occasions like this(?)
Hm, we’ll see
