I got angry at my PC at work (one I supplied). I've installed PCBSD on it and it kept freezing, it also doesn't seem to like LibreOffice - When you double click a document it doesn't open it in LibreOffice. It also freezes if I try to access too much stuff over NFS...Ubuntu seemed fine on it, but just didn't feel good to use.

So I was frustrated...I was on eBay...I now have a new and unboxed Mac Mini coming to the office soon...2.3GHz i5, currently with 2GB of RAM which will be bumped up to 8GB.

So, I'll be looking at selling the old PC at some point to fill this new hole in my bank account!

Sure are worse things you could've bought

I took delivery of it on Thursday. It feels slower than I'd have thought it would, but it's constantly hitting about 100mb free RAM...Hopefully it'll feel speedier when I give it 8GBs tomorrow!

WTH are you running on it!?

Clicky

TBH, Ubuntu seemed to love RAM too, I'd usually only have about 2GB of 8GB free most of the time...PCBSD regularly left me with a few hundred MBs of RAM left of 8GB too...

Erm...

You do realise that on *Nix systems the RAM is supposed to be as full as possible?

That said, OSX looks to be paging a whole lot. Looking at that image, 4GiB looks like the minimum you should run

Well that's what I had thought, but Linux and PCBSD guys seem to always boast how little RAM they use, which somewhat suggested to me that 8GB would be more or less completely empty...

If they were talking about the minimum RAM usage, such Puppy Linux being able to run inside 100MiB, they are correct.

However, quite sensibly, even a lightweight distro will cache to RAM until it runs out of either RAM to fill up or things to cache. This is because it makes no sense to leave RAM empty whilst paging to and from the hard disk.

Aye, I just didn't expect a desktop system to swallow up and keep 8GB then take forever to page it out...You'd have thought that with that much on a desktop machine (i.e. I'm not running the server distros) that it'd try and keep a good chunk for stuff that isn't cached.

the new RAM for the Mac arrived this morning. It's sitting nicely at about 2GB at the moment and feels very responsive

I have found that 3GB is the minimum for a smooth experience in OSX - I’d certainly say that would be true of Leopard, not sure what Lion would be comfortable with as a minimum. My MacPro shipped with 2GB, and it seemed choppy. Compared with the slower processor in my MBP, which nipped along on the same OS. That had 3GB RAM.

So I upgraded the RAM in the desktop machine, and all is smooth and lovely.

My MacBook is limited to 2GB. It's the one frustration I have with it these days.

Mine is maxed out at 3GB. It’s enough, and I don’t plan on replacing it for a while yet. I’d up the RAM if I could, but it’s running perfectly well with what it has.

Aye, my MacBook is maxed at 2GB. It's enough for what I do, but then I've had to buy other machines to do more demanding things...