![]() ![]() The question is whether or not this will affect performance, and what can be done about it? When looking at the System Memory pie chart in Activity Monitor, it's apparent that the "Inactive" memory segment seems to be growing. I guess the closes non video thing I do that I occasionally notice temps or fan speed increasing is doing VM updates (Ubuntu or XP).A few users have noticed that over time the amount of free RAM on their systems seems to go down, even if the active RAM size has not changed much. I use higher CPU percentages on the MBA than I do on my other MACs but they seldom max out. ![]() I use about 50 applications on my MBA (not all at once) but most are not particularly taxing: MS Office, UML Modeling, Diagraming, Project Planning, Light development, Browsing, Mail, terminal emulation, Virtual machines, photo editing, scanning/OCR - not much that I do taxes the MBA except when video is involved (Skype, Quicktime, Flash etc). Again these are slower than my other MACs and while I notice 2 seconds vs 5 seconds, I don't find the difference big enough to be annoying given how many apps I can leave running. The apps you mention are in the under 5 second category except for iTunes which is sometimes in the 5 second range but sometimes in the 10 second for no apparent reason. Can be a bit faster or slower depending on whats been cached. Program start times stock were in the 5-10 second range but are now (Xslimer) less than 5 seconds on average. But I pretty much only boot when I fly so thats on average a couple of times a week. My current boot times are under a minute, but thats still slow compared to my other MACs. On my MBA I've seen boot times of up to 1.5 minutes. I've owned a number of ultra portable or slim and light notebooks and they are never quite up to the performance of their larger counterparts but can still be quite acceptable. The MBA's performance is definitely better than I expected but I'd say I'm more pleased than impressed by its performance. I'm impressed with the overall MBA package - size, weight, screen, keyboard, form factor, quality etc. I use it 10-12 hours a day for work and think its great. I imagine trying anything disk AND cpu intensive (like ripping a DVD) would also adversly impact other apps.īut I'm extremely happy with my MBA. The only thing that I've found that renders performance unacceptable is doing large file transfers (like an image backup) while trying to do other things. Video causes the fan to max out and temps to rise but not excessively on my unit (and no core shutdowns). I routinely run about a dozen OS X apps, plus a Parallels Windows XP VM plus a few Windows apps all at once with great performance. I never really needed it for the reason I bought it but it has come in handy a couple of times when an app goes wiled and consumes a cpu until you figure out whats going on and stop it. In order of most to least:Ī) Xslimmer saved several GB of space and most apps start up noticeably faster.ī) SmartSleep saved a couple of gigs of disk space and allows faster slwwp/wake cyclesĬ) iDefrag is not something you have to do often unless you are running your disk > 80% full but it improved boot times by about 20% and some programs and operations are a bit faster.ĭ) AppDelete saved me several GB of disk space but you could get the same benifit by loading OS X from scratch and choosing options not to install any apps, drivers, etc that you don't need.Į) iFreemem makes you feel better by seeing more free RAM but I'm not sure it actually improves performance over OS X's memory managment other than preplanning garbage collection before starting something big.į) Bokeh - allows you to dedicate all your CPU to a single app and/or freeze indivisual apps. While All of these are fine programs, I really did not need any of them but they all do provide some benefits. When I first got the MBA I was worried about its limitations and invested in software like Appdelete, iFreemem, iDefrag, Bokeh, SmartSleep, and Xslimmer. Given its price point issues were magnified and while I don't discount the fact that some people had some issues with some machines, I know a lot of MBA owners that are very happy (including myself). Like any product, its not perfect, and there are some number of defective units as well. Specs are not everything and like most Mac's the MBA is much more than the sum of its parts. It seems to polarize people and there are a lot of MBA haters out there - even Mac fans. The MBA is one if the most controversial Macs to come out in many years. The short answer to your question is the MBA 1.6/80 will run everything you list at once and much much more without any issues whatsoever. ![]()
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