On-Site Mac Repair
Greater Boston, Massachusetts

A dual 1.8GHz G5 and a quad 2.66GHz Xeon Mac Pro. It "Looks" like its some serious power. The G5 has 2 GB of ram and it is VERY fast. Its a little slow at video encoding but thats about it. The Mac Pro has 1 GB of RAM and is slow as dirt. Its pretty fast at video encoding, but everything else is dog slow. I hope you liked the beachball from OS X 10.1, because it's back. Turns out, the intel code in a universal binary actually uses more RAM than it's PowerPC counterpart. From my observations, I'd say that intel Mac RAM ÷ 2 = PowerPC Mac RAM. So my MacBook has:
( 512 MB - 64 MB (As Video Mem) ) ÷ 2 = 224 MB
I guess this explains why sometimes the machine runs so slow, the trackpad won't even work. The Mac Pro is a little better. It has 1GB ÷ 2 = 512 MB. You can at least check your mail, surf the web and chat on iChat at the same time. You can't do that on the MacBook without beachballing. Hopefully, RAM prices drop fast. At current prices, I'm looking at about a $1500 RAM upgrade between the two Macs. Oh, and the reason the G5 is in this picture is because the guy that bought it on ebay returned it because he says the front FireWire port doesn't work. What a pain in the ass. To Craigslist we go...