|
|
|
|
| Welcome, Guest | Home | Search | Login | Register | |
| Author | My IIci is now a 32 MB monster aka favorite RAM size? (Read 38024 times) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Bolkonskij
Administrator 1024 MB  Posts: 2023 
|
on: July 07, 2024, 12:42
I've tried to get along with 16 MB on my IIci for quite some time. And hey, it works. You can. But then occassionally you run into the dreaded "out of RAM / not enough RAM left to keep the window open" error. So, I've finally ordered some fresh new RAM from Siliconinsider in France and I'm now in the 32 MB club! How will I ever make use of such vast amounts ? ;-) I know there's folks who like to "max out" their machines RAM independently of the OS and like to watch their Mac boot while they get a cup of coffee. There's others who like era appropiate amounts for the hardcore purist nostalgic moments. And then there's those who prefer kind of a middle way, enough to work with the machine but not as scarce as what we had back in the 90's. So where do you fit in? What's your favorite RAM size on System 7 and why? |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Last Edit: July 08, 2024, 05:19 by Bolkonskij
|
Jatoba
|
256 MB  Posts: 270 System 9 Newcomer!
Reply #1 on: July 07, 2024, 15:12
|
I like whatever solution works best and serves us best. Normally that means maxing out RAM. Some apps need less total RAM to run, though (i.e. some version of Emacs). It's also sad if the OS can't use all the RAM, so for example, on a IIci, I would wonder how I could enable as much of the RAM as possible under 24-bit mode OSes like System 6 and earlier, and 24-bit System 7. I think 3rd party software can take care of that? Connectix? Less RAM does mean slightly quicker boot times, though, usually.
|
wove
|
1024 MB Posts: 1363
Reply #2 on: July 07, 2024, 17:13
|
I think the biggest shortcoming with the ClassicMac OSes is with its memory management. How much memory one needs depends a lot on what applications you want/need to use and your workflow. With System 6 I ran one application at a time, but when System 7 came along, I wanted to have everything I might use open and along with that workflow, came constant crashes do to memory problems. Part of that was do to not having enough RAM, and I always thought more of it was do poor memory management by the OS. (RISC OS on Acorn had cooperative multitasking and it very rarely has memory problems.) It was a very well know bottleneck, and there were more than a few RAM Utilities created to address these shortcomings. Most of them tended to be rather expensive, and as near as I could ever tell they introduced their own stability problems. And for me during the 90s as the hardware became more and more powerful, system stability issues were just becoming intolerable. I was delighted that OS X solved many of those problems right from the start. I was even quite delighted to find that applications ran in the OS X Classic environment with greater stability than they ran in the Classic OS. In OS 7-9 I felt that everything ran better with more RAM, and typically I put in as much RAM as I could possibly afford.
|
Jatoba
|
256 MB Posts: 270 System 9 Newcomer!
Reply #3 on: July 07, 2024, 18:31
|
@wove Those instability issues you described with System 7, I certainly have not seen them in 6+ years of using Mac OS 9.2.2 on the Mac mini G4. In fact, OS X gets perpetually stuck on a beachball on the same machine more often than the equivalent in OS 9. It's true you can sandbox Mac OS apps within the Classic emulator in OS X, though, meaning that if Mac OS would crash, it crashes only the emulator and not the host OS. If we had a Mac OS X emulator inside Mac OS 9, the exact same would be true, but the other way around. Like using Windows on Virtual PC. I don't think we can correctly say that this means "Windows apps run more stably under Mac OS/X", though. In fact, many are simply incompatible and do not run properly or not run at all in OS X (Escape Velocity, Realmz etc.). I would still be using OS X otherwise. But rather than having it split disk space with my Mac OS install, I simply removed any trace of OS X, and honestly it couldn't have been any better this way, at least for me. In fact, I wish I had done that a lot sooner. I still rarely pop OS X from an external drive though whenever I need to create single-layer BD-R HFS+ backups of my Mac OS content. (OS 9 can even read the burned BD-Rs, shockingly.) It's also true OS X has full protected memory as opposed to the partial (any?) implementation in Mac OS 9.2.2, which should lead to more stability, but clearly that's not all that counts for stability. While it theoretically should be helpful, most of the time it is completely unnecessary IMO, as my OS 9 install runs completely stable, meaning that any more memory protection would be a performance overhead with no benefit in return, at least as far as "normal usage" is concerned.
|
ClassicHasClass
|
32 MB Posts: 39
Reply #4 on: July 07, 2024, 21:52
|
I'm also on Team Maxed Out. My NetBSD IIci has a full 128MB in it, but then it's a server. I also have the full 16GB in my Quad G5, 1GB in my 7300, 2GB in my Sawtooth G4 and 2GB in my MDD G4, though 9.2.2 sees only 1.5GB of that.
|
lauland
|
512 MB Posts: 674 Symtes 7 Mewconer!
Reply #5 on: July 08, 2024, 05:51
|
I don't know if I trust it, but the (gigabit ethernet) G4 I've been using for Classilla building has 2g of ram (Four 256m dimms), and MacOS 9.2.1 seems to almost all of that avail. I was expecting to see 1.5g like @ClassicHasClass sees on his MDD, so, like I said, maybe it's lying?
|
MTT
|
256 MB Posts: 394 SSW7 Oldtimer
Reply #6 on: July 09, 2024, 03:27
|
Quote from: Bolkonskij: "I'm now in the 32 MB club! How will I ever make use of such vast amounts ?Whoa! - 32MB's! and only another 96 to go  I guess I'm on the max it out team, and I'm addicted to coffee  My first Mac, an SE, I maxed it out to 4MB! That definitely helped my transition into System 7. I've had various System 7 capable Mac's between then and now, and I always tried getting as much RAM into them as I could. Myself and Photoshop prefer it that way. These days, I'm down to a single System 7 capable Mac, my venerable Centris 660av. It arrived home already Maxed out at 68MB's. I am eternally grateful to the previous owner to whom I owe my undying gratitude to, for tossing out such a wonderful old machine at the right time for me to find and bring home ...We're posting off this reply to S7T, together
Last Edit: July 09, 2024, 03:37 by MTT
|
cballero
|
1024 MB Posts: 1176 System 7, today and forever
Reply #7 on: July 09, 2024, 04:30
|
I wanna say that you could possibly experiment with the RAM Charger and OptiMem extensions to eek out a little more RAM from your 32 MB RAM ceiling? I think that with or without RAM Doubler, this utility is lauded at being pretty useful, and at least one version works fine with System 7, including Mac OS 7.6.1
|
Jatoba
|
256 MB Posts: 270 System 9 Newcomer!
Reply #8 on: July 09, 2024, 10:16
|
Quote from: ClassicHasClass I also have the full 16GB in my Quad G5 You might be pleased to learn that some folks over at MacRumors PPC subforum have broken the 16 GB limit to be as high as 26.5 GB (RAM actually usable past the 16 GB mark). The relevant comments start around comment #114 in that thread. Were I still able to have access to my Quads, I'd definitely waste no time in trying this. And probably setup various VMs and a RAM Disk to use it all.
|
|
Pages: [1]
|
| |||||||||
|
© 2021 System7Today.com. |
