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Lion's eat RAM's

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I recently purchased a Mac-mini(Yes I own a Mac now) with relatively the same hardware specs as my(well the one I work with) MacBook pro, Intel Core i5,Graphics 3000(or whatever) etc. The only difference being that the ram in the Mini was only 2GB and the Laptop has 4GB,we will come back to this later.

The MacBook Pro experience: My experience with the laptop has been great,never lagging and I really got used to using a track-pad instead of a mouse and found gestures very helpful for quick desktop management with a small screen.It was also very responsive and I keep tons of windows open all the time without problems.



 When I got my Mac Mini,I popped it out of its box and plugged it in to my standard PC peripherals,switched it on and everything worked fine ,I got a few nice surprises too,I did not expect it to come with a wireless card or built in Bluetooth,just like it does on the MacBook.

Then I tried to run Safari,iTunes and Xcode all at once(I do this often while working on the MacBook) and things where not so fine anymore ,the Dock was slow to respond and animate and everything was sticky.So I downloaded an app that shows memory usage in the finder bar,and Wow was I surprised,20MB free is the kind of thing you expect to see when running a hefty virtual machine,not 3 apps,it's crazy even for a 2 gig machine).

 Some research into the subject revealed that OSX Lion uses as much RAM as it can so that it has quick access to data for applications,making them more responsive,however I was getting the opposite on my Mini with 2GB of RAM,compared to the awesome performance of the 4GB in the MacBook,So to me it seemed that 2GB of RAM just wasn't enough for Lion.

I decided to obtain a 4GB chip to stick along side one of the 1GB chips already in the Mac-Mini and I proved myself right. From startup Lion gobbled up 2 of my RAMs(2GBs of RAM,I'm trying to be metaphorical) but proceeded to be smooth and quick,exactly what I'm used to on the MacBook Pro,after starting up a virtual machine and numerous other applications I noticed that nearly all of my 5GB of ram was gobbled up (I had 10MB free) but I didn't notice a performance drop like I did when I only had 2GB of ram. So whats the point of this story?


 Well the point is OSX Lion is great but if you intend running it,make sure your machine has at the very least 4GB of ram or your experience will be tarnished PS: I realize that I may have written this article badly,but its 12:45AM so that's my excuse.
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