At 11:57 PM -0400 7/30/99, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>I have 48 MB of RAM installed, and noticed a decrease in battery life
>when I upgraded from the original 16 MB.
>
>I believe that virtual memory is about as fast as physical RAM under OS
>8.1, and I do not believe there is any advantage to installing more than
>48 MB, only the disadvantage of further decreased battery time.
It's not guaranteed that the larger upgrades will use more power than a 32
MB upgrade. They might even use less. Often, it comes down to chip count,
and it's very possible for a 64 MB SODIMM to have a lower chip count,
because one can use higher density chips rather than doubling the number of
chips.
VM is nowhere near as fast as physical RAM. If you have VM on and have to
hit the disk, there will definitely be a difference in speed, because the
hard drive is many orders of magnitude slower than RAM. (On the other
hand, if you aren't using all your physical memory, there should be
essentially no speed hit.)
Keep in mind that if you have VM on, the hard drive is not allowed to spin
down. If you turn VM off, and you aren't doing anything that accesses the
drive, the drive can spin down and battery life will go up considerably.
Usually the two biggest keys to making a PowerBook last a long time on the
road are reducing the display brightness to one step above off and letting
the HD spin down as much as possible.
Some people actually go for the route of buying as much RAM as possible and
using a big chunk of it for a RAMdisk. Then you can put the apps and
documents you're working on in the RAMdisk and keep the HD spun down for
very long periods of time.
Tim Seufert
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