An engineer friend of mine made an interesting point to me the other day when we were chatting about this kind of thing. Apparently, there are upper limits which depend upon the operating system or systems in use, above which an upgrade is a totally vacuous exercise. According to him, and I trust his judgement as he's an experienced design engineer formerly employed by Texas Instruments and, more latterly, Intel® in their I.C design labs, on a portable machine an "upgrade" beyond the point where the applications or operating system would be noticeably enhanced would actually become a downgrade because of the current drawn by the additional components. On portable hardware where battery life is an issue, this could deplete the charge cycle of the battery and, thus, over time deplete the overall life cycle of the battery.
Therefore, some of the "myths" which so-called informed people push out telling people to push the machines to the max, rather than apply technical common sense, are actually misleading people into shortening the life and, ultimately, performance of their hardware. This is true not only of Apple's hardware but as a general rule. He also tells me that the idea of installing over-rated memory and other components is also not technically advisable for similar reasons. For instance, installing memory with a clock frequency of 1333 MHZ into a system designed to handle memory at its buss speed of 1067 MHZ just because of the price, is not wise. I specifically asked him this question following the interesting discussion on memory and over-clocking in this group recently. It's interesting what you can pick up if you talk to some of these people. I'm'm trying to persuade Gavin to join this group, I'm sure that, despite the fact that he knows little about accessibility, his input would be invaluable on the technical side of things. As per Bryan's comments about theoretical speed testings, I totally agree. In fact I've advocated this for quite some time. The user experience is by far the best guide rather than just presuming one has the best hardware based purely on benchmarking. Sure, they can be a rough guide. But the ultimate factor is the job that it does for the user. On 13 Aug 2011, at 17:45, Bryan Jones wrote: Sorry, I can't personally speak to the benefits or drawbacks of going above 4GB of RAM or installing 1333 instead of 1067 as I've not yet done that myself. However, my personal impressions after having upgraded several macs from 2 to 4GB is that the increase has produced general speed and stability improvements. Again, those are only my impressions as I tend not to run any of the official speed tests because I long ago decided that the "seat-of-the-pants" test is what really matters to me. In my experience, some of the most noticeable and satisfying speed improvements have come after upgrading hard drives. While upgrading from a 5400 RPM drive to a 7200RPM is pretty affordable these days, I've got to admit that the SSD in my Air is a revelation and I am officially spoiled by the speed of the thing. HTH, Bryan On Aug 12, 2011, at 1:08 PM, Geoff Waaler wrote: > According to OtherWorld computing my 7,1 box can address 8GB. Since my bus > speed is 1.07 GHZ, I assume there would be an advantage installing 1333 MHZ > over the 1067 that I have? <--- Mac Access At Mac Access Dot Net ---> To reply to this post, please address your message to [email protected] You can find a monthly formatted archive of all messages posted to the Mac-Access forum at the following URL: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/pipermail/mac-access/index.html> The Mac-Access mailing list is guaranteed malware, spyware, Trojan, virus and worm-free! Please remember to update your membership options periodically by visiting the list website at: <http://mail.tft-bbs.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/mac-access/options/>
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