Five hundred and twelve megabytes of DRAM is the most memory I've ever had in a computer I owned outright. Thats how much memory was installed in this Mac Mini when I bought it down to the Apple Store in Durham. I had 512 megabytes of memory in the self-assembled Windows box my friend Rainey helped me put together. He'd done it before.
That was good enough for me. It worked just fine without those few dangling cables we didn't know what to do with. We both bought 512 meg RAM memory boards for our newly assembled computers, mostly for the bragging rights it gave us. My first computer, a Mac Classic (several computers ago), had one megabyte of RAM, and for the real power users, an expansion slot for another whole megabyte of random access memory. Man, in the late Eighties, back in the last millennium, in a completely different century than the double "O"s, having two megabytes of RAM in your rig was living large.
That's why our buying a lot more RAM memory than seemed necessary was an extravagance, a luxury. An impulse buy we really couldn't lose by just doing it. That believe carried over to the Mac Mini when I switched back to Mac to remain friends with my youngest brother and next door neighbor. He was sick of me whining about the security problems me and everybody else was having with Windows, when he knew all those troubles would end if I just bought the cheapest Mac Apple made. He was right. I was wrong.
I've been carrying on about memory because a few months ago my brother helped me max out the DRAM to two (2) Gigabytes. Presently, I'm ready to swear on a stack of bibles that 512 megabytes of DRAM is not near as much DRAM as I once thought it was. I don't know the numbers. I'm not a statistician (I wish that I were sometimes. Now would be nice.), so I don't exactly know the percentages of how much more DRAM there is in my Mac Mini... twice as much, three times as much.. I donna know. A lot. It's almost like I bought a new computer for the $50 I paid for a couple of one gig DRAM boards.
That's why I'm excited by the expected arrival of the new 64-bit Apple operating system they call Snow Leopard. The 32-bit operating system I'm using now is only a Leopard, but with my new memory, it's bad, man. The big cat's meow. That's why I hate that I gotta get shed of my precious Mac Mini. It's only got a 32-bit Intel Duo processor chip. Poor baby. I can't upgrade it as is to the Snow Leopard operating system.
This 2006 model of the Mac Mini can be upgraded to the Intel 2 Duo_ whatever_, that's a 64-bit chip. But, buying that chip straight from newegg.com would set me back $3-400, and I can get the latest model refurbished Mac Mini with a faster Intel chip and a nVidia graphics chipset and a like-new guarantee from Apple that's a lot faster for a little less than $500, and I'd still own my cute little 32-bit system that still makes me happy.
Being limited to 2 gigs of DRAM because it's a 32-bit chip and operating system for what I use a computer for is no real limit at all. But, if anything, maxing out the memory on this little computer has been a lesson unto me. Mo' memory is mo' bettah.
That's the big deal with 64-bit systems. It's not so much the fact that they're faster, more compact, and more adaptive and flexible for prospective changes in technology, it's the fact that a gazillion gigabytes of DRAM can be installed and used efficiently. At least, that's the rap "they" have run down on me, and I've confessed a million times to being overly gullible.
None of us will have to wait too much longer to find out if the hype has legs. Apple has stated that they'll bring it out some time in September, and today is August the 11th. We only have to wait a couple of months at the most for the reviews to start pouring in.
Most of the Mac's sold in the last five years have 64-bit chips in them. That's no bottleneck, the Mac horde has had them their cute little laptops for years. The software upgrade to Snow Leopard cost less than $30. The fanbois are excited. They're waiting like I am with great anticipation. It's a miracle, I tell ya... OR... maybe it's just business as usual.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
