Re: [tlug] Akihabara, used/refurbished Mac laptops?

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2017-11-09 13:32 +0900 (Thu), Kevin Sullivan wrote:

> I had [my mac] upgraded to [8 GB RAM] last year from 4gb & 500mb
> hdd, and I was very pleased with the USD$400 spent. Night and day
> difference in the speed and usability for my style of leaving so
> many tabs open and programs running at all times.

It would be night and day difference for anybody on any OS just
because of the HDD → SSD switch

But more importantly for Mac users, the base system (at least in
recent versions) with no programs running uses close to 4 GB of
memory, so a 4 GB Mac these days is going to be slow if you run almost
anything at all on it.

Modern Linux distros, at least if you're using a lighter desktop
system such as Xfce, run around 2 GB memory usage before you start
opening programs, so if your not a particularly heavy user (a dozen or
fewer Chrome tabs and no OpenOffice running at the same time) a 4 GB
machine is still adequate, albeit approaching the limit.

One of my experimental desktop machines is an [ECS Liva Z] with the
standard 4 GB of RAM and it never touches swap with just Chrome and
lots of urxvt terminals running. (The Celeron N3350 is pretty anemic,
though; Chrome takes quite a while to get everything fully loaded when
you start it with a typical set of Gmail, Google Calendar, etc. tabs
open. Still, the ability to run not just one but two 4k monitors on a
tiny, portable \24,000 box (including 32 GB of SSD built-in) is pretty
neat. Large window movements and the like are slow as expected with
such a GPU, but when you've got more than a dozen 100+ line terminals
all up a the same time, who needs to move things around? :-)

[ECS Liva Z]: https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/B01N5MHCN9/

cjs
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Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

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