Inspirational Technology

Crucial is fast

As I mentioned in my post about Mac OS X and RAM I had to order new RAM from Crucial. I ordered it Saturday morning with their default 2 day shipping and even though it wasn't scheduled to arrive until Wednesday, it showed up today. Thankfully! Running on 256MB of RAM made the machine perform about as fast as my old Pentium 200, it's horrible. So I'll reiterate, I can't believe Apple still ships machines with only 128MB of RAM! I can't even imagine what that must be like. The machines should at least be usable out of the box and with 128MB or 256MB of RAM they're just not.

Extra thankfully, it seems the Crucial RAM works correctly and I'm optimistic that it finally solves the problems I was seeing. So my advice, if you have a recent Powermac that has constant but random application crashes make sure you have really good RAM. Even brands like Kingston aren't good enough and if you're buying RAM, buy it from Crucial. Even if all the RAM checks out in the hardware tests and the Apple store runs all their tests against it and it passes, it can still be the RAM. Whatever the problem is, it's very subtle. I also know that this is not just a problem with this particular box, I tried the RAM in another FW800 Powermac and it had the exact same problem. Five sticks, none of which run stable. Talk about frustrating.