Tikkabik

Bob's Power Mac G4 is in my shop temporarily; I've bought a new LCD panel for it as his olde crufty CRT has flaked out, but it hasn't arrived yet. BestBuy.com had an absolutely amazing deal on a 14-inch LCD with native 1024 x 768 resolution for $149 -- it's only has a d-sub connector on it, but it'll do nicely. The G4 has a Radeon 8500 card in it, so it could handle a DVI display, but DVI-equipped flat panels are so much more money I just decided it wasn't worth it.

Anyway, it struck me as I was looking at it that Bob's "digital audio"-era Power Mac G4 uses the same RAM as my Quicksilver-era dual 1GHz model: Both are configured with 512MB of PC133 RAM. Since Bob's machine is out of commission for a few days, I absconded with the 512MB DIMM in his machine and installed it in mine. I'm amazed at what a difference it makes.

It's a simple thing, and it's been obvious to me for a while that I'd underpowered the Quicksilver by not upgrading it before now with more RAM. Playing memory-hungry games, for example, I'd often hear the hard drive chittering away as it managed swap space. But seeing, as they say, is believing, and I'm just astounded at how much faster the Mac is to boot, launch software and perform other tasks that it was starting to lag with.

So now I'm planning on buying two new DIMMs -- I'll stick 'em both in Bob's machine. Pricewatch.com has SMKSuperstore.com listed as selling generic 512MB DIMMs for less than $40 each. The specs seem to match what Apple requires, and the feedback for this vendor is generally positive -- anyone have any idea if these will work okay for sure? That's almost half what the cheapest vendor on DealRAM.com is selling them for.