How much ram is enough? (Ibook)

Hi, I'm going to be ordering an ibook with 512 ram

ii heard that the boot up time is around 56 seconds.

I want to decrease the boot time, how much ram do you think i'll need (max at 1.5gig) to decrease to around 45-50 seconds?

I'm very conscious about boot time and i don't like to wait!

also, how much ram do you think i'll need if i open 10 safari (or some other internet explorer) windows and 5 msn messneger msg boxes and run itunes, ms word, excel, some video player in the background?

thanks in advance, help appreciated!

 

Uhmmmm, wow, I never have that much stuff going on all at once. How about "as much ram as will fit?" I have a 12" PB, 1.33 ghz, 1.25 gig ram. Bootup is "less than a minute" by a reasonable amount. I put in that much ram, 'cause that's how much would fit, and I had a couple hundred and change burning a hole in my pocket. That seems to be fine for itunes, netscape, Excel, terminal, maybe word or text-edit and iPhoto all at once.

 

i usually leave like 10 internet explorers on my xp, running winamp, msn messenger, WMPlayer , and a few other things on at the same time NORMALLY.

lol so i unno it'll handle it

 

What is going make it boot slowly is the 4200RPM hard drive not the memory. I would say 512MB should be sufficient.

 

I agree with the last.

Moreover, Macs have a cool hybernation feature, so that you practically don't need to boot:
just close the book, and then open it when you want to work, and it will start almost immediately. So, I'd say the booting time is not an issue with Apple books.

 

If you wantr faster boot times, get a faster hard drive.

 

is that sleep mode? Cuz that wastes energy

 

well, comfort always costs some energy.
I have no numbers at hand, however I think it takes just a couple of Watts in the sleep mode.

 

osx is quite memory-intensive, 256MB is next to useless when you have multiple windows open and doing work. 512MB is minimum imho. If you want your experience to be smooth, get at least 1gb.

cheers,

yass

 

Actually, I was told exactly the same before purchasing Powerbook. However, the program I installed to measure
the RAM usage was actually showing that I was on the level of 300MB unless I was running something really really memory intensive. So, I'd say unless the guy knows for what he is going to spend additional RAM, 512MB is save.

 

I have a 600mhz G3 Ibook with 640mb RAM, and that is enough to have 10 Safari windows open, with Itunes, Word and MSN running. I think if you had about 1gb of RAM you'd be able to run all of the applications you have listed comfortably.

 

512 mb should be fine... however, 768 or 1gig should be very comfortable.

The more the merrier...

 

I've always been told that the size of the stick doesn't matter - it's what you do with it.

 

well i want to lower start up time so i can start up really fast during class. but if there benchmarks show that it doesn't much difference then i won't waste money ^^