Okay,
Way back in the day when we started working on THE ORIGINAL XBOX Microsoft sent us XBox Dev Machines – they were Apple Macintosh Pro boxes with Dual Core Power PC chips. The original XBox was to have 3 cores.
That was in 2000. After the project was over no one wanted the dev machines back. We were allowed to keep them despite the fact that each box cost $10,000. So I took one home and that became my first Mac.
I used it for about 5 years. THEN IT DIED. Sad… sad day.
So I bought ANOTHER Mac Pro. Only this time I got one from Fry’s electronics so I knew it was a late model. I saved about $700 but I was able to reuse most of the equipment from my Power Mac.
Now that machine – circa 2006 is starting to grind to a halt. I mean what do you do with a machine that
can’t keep up with your typing or even play audio files?
To replace it? Budget about… oh… $4,500. Holy crap.
So – I did a little checking and I found a way to salvage my beloved tower.
#1) More RAM. Mac’s have ALWAYS been very efficient with RAM. 2GB was enough forever with most apps being a 20-30MB (compared to their Windows counter parts that were 10X as big). So my 4GB was huge 5 years ago. BUT… most Mac applications now tilt the scale at 150-300MB. Some as big as 500MB. Open up 3 or 4 things and suddenly – you’re low on RAM. So I was able to scare up another 4GB of ram for $100, doubling my memory.
#2) And this was the biggest. Move to the boot drive to SSD. When I bought my macbook air, the hardware specs were less than impressive but the Fanboys raved about it’s performance. Why? Because of the SSD Drive. This is how bad my MacPro had gotten – with the latest software I could not listen to audio. It was garbled and crappy. What the heck? A combination of low memory and slow swap disk
really killed the systems core threads.
But after $100 memory upgrade that doubled my RAM (8GB baby) and a much more expensive $450 upgrade to a $256GB SSD drive – my machine is FASTER THAN IT HAS EVER BEEN.
It’s like I have a brand new machine. It’s crazy.
Eventully I’m going to get one of those $5000 machines with the dual quad core processors, 16GB or RAM and most important of all a 512GB SSD drive, but for now, I’ve got $4,500 worth of performance for $550.
And now I can listen to my music again. With enough RAM for the processors to run free, and the super snappy response of the SSD my drivers function correctly.
Wunderbar.
Scott