New Memory For Ginger

So Ginger's been working on putting together some movies for the upcoming school auction using iMovie on her Mac. The problem is it's been slow going. I mean really slow. Her machine had 2 Gig of memory and it was still running like a dog. Now the machine itself is a couple years old, but still it shouldn't have been running this slow I didn't think. Turns out part of the problem is the memory footprint of one of the applications she was running, specifically iPhoto. Normally I suspect this program isn't that bad, but when trying to run with iMovie, which wanted close to a Gig of memory all by itself running iPhoto is just the computer's Achilles’ heel. That's because iPhoto apparently has a large number of photos on the computer resident in memory at any time. Unfortunately since Ginger's got all my pictures from the past four or five years of digital pictures this ends up being about 33,000 pictures that iPhoto is tracking (which in turns has it wanting almost 2 Gig of memory all by itself).

So to alleviate the problem I bought more RAM for Ginger's computer. Another 4 Gig. She only had one paired slot left though, so I had to remove some of the memory to add the 4 Gig. Now after the memory upgrade she's running with 5 and a half Gig of memory, and it runs a lot better. I think it can still slow down a bit if she has iMovie and iPhoto up and running simultaneously, but it definitely runs a bit better in the normal case now. All this has me amazed at how well Picasa runs under Windows, because before last Christmas I was running that on a Windows machine that only had 1 Gig of memory and it handled tracking all 33 thousand photos of mine fine for the most part. The other thing that sort of surprised me was the cost. I figured since it was for the Mac I was going to be paying an arm and a leg, but I got the memory from Crucial and got it for only $43 a Gig, which I don't think is all that bad.