>I have experienced the same thing you are talking about. The RAM savings
>of turning off extensions does NOT apply with all extensions, just with
>some. For instance, if I turn off Speed Doubler (includes a control
>panel and extension) it will save about 1 Mb of ram. I will guess there
>could be similar results with some other third party extensions. I will
>also add that the old "turn OFF unused extensions" mantra is largely a
>carry over from earlier days of the Mac OS but does not work the same
>with OS8.x.
Yup, Speed Doubler is a good example of the classic speed-vs-storage
tradeoff, since it uses a chunk of memory (that 1MB, give or take) to
cache recompiled 68k code. A number of other extensions need to
create caches or tables in addition to the memory that the code
itself takes up.
Each iteration of the System file has more functionality rolled into
it (that was previously available in an extension). That means with
each OS release, you get less choices of things to (usefully) turn
off. There are actually more items in the Extensions folder than
there used to be, but more and more of them are just shared
libraries, which don't load any code at boot time (rather, they load
and unload with applications). The extra stuff in the System file can
often be turned off by excising it with Resedit, but 99.99% of people
really don't want to go there. ;)
An example of the above would be turning off Drag & Drop, desktop
clippings and such in 7.1 by removing the appropriate extensions. You
can't do that (easily) in 7.5 because the extension code has been
added to the System file, so it's no longer "optional". It's all
still really just a bunch of components, but because the packaging
has changed it appears more monolithic to the end user.
--
Marc Sira | [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"If you can't play with words, what good are they?"
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