Zac67 wrote:
512 MB might be slightly low at times but usually 1 GB is enough, provided you're not working with very large files and/or loads of programs.
I don't know what you're running, but the 1GB limitation on the PowerPC Mini can still be a great annoyance:
The working set of OpenOffice.org/NeoOffice can exceed 128M to 256M, depending what you're doing;
(Note: To my surprise, all I have around here is a recent version of Ubuntu with OpenOffice.org 3.x and the resident set is down to ~32MB before opening a document. Not bad! Maybe NeoOffice or the native port has advanced as much recently and I just haven't been near a Mac to notice.)
Use of any Adobe app with even a modestly print-sized image will rapidly exceed 256M (or much more); yes, print resolutions are huge, but they can only be considered "large" if they're beyond what you expect to deal with every day.
Judicious use of multiple browser windows or tabs is also doomed to eat up memory. I'm a particularly abusive browser user, so check out my worst-case here on DragonFly BSD: Right now I have ten(!) Firefox windows open with more than a dozen tabs in each, and the fox's resident set is 717M! Even with a lighter browser like Safari, and only a dozen pages open, you're looking at a reasonable fraction (128M+?) of that. Do those pages have Flash? That has a footprint, too.
My experience with the G4 Mini is that you can 'survive' in 1GB, while if only 1.25-1.5GB had been possible it could fit a full workflow (one Word document opened in NeoOffice; one serious Illustrator project; enough browser tabs to figure out what you're doing with the Adobeware; and of course Mail.app and Itunes) without having to expect any swapping. For browsing + Itunes alone, or if you are conscientious about singletasking and closing all unneeded programs, 1GB is comfortable.
(Swapping won't kill you, but even one second staring at the hypno-wheel can throw you off when you're on-task; suddenly you have to make sure what you're doing had an effect, instead of just doing it.)
...
Since there's not "much" price difference between Intel and PPC, I'd have to suggest going with the Intel machines if your goal is to be a Mac user; it's already rumored that they're thinking of cutting the PPC machines loose when it comes to OS updates. On the other hand, if you have a whole bunch of legacy PPC stuff (like the Adobe stack pre-CS3, if you aren't paying to upgrade), G5 machines are starting to go for a song and still seem competitive vs. Rosetta.
...and if you spring for Intel hardware, make sure it doesn't have its own lame memory limitations: The Intel Mini might still be limited to 3GB, and the white-plastic Intel iMacs are limited to 3GB (blame the Intel chipset used), while the current crop of aluminum iMacs can at least take 4. This is terribly weak for "luxury" machines (where's that quote from Jobs about not making a 'crappy' computer?) when any $500 desktop from Dell can probably fit 8.
...Meanwhile, if I didn't miss something, the Mac Pro is still a Xeon + FB-DIMM design, so right now you can't *buy* a Mac that can take a modern amount of RAM without paying the MSRP of a NeXT cube and the electric bill of a small data center. (Well.. who's using an Xserve as a desktop?) Hopefully they'll address this within the year, though it'll be amusing if they don't.
(Can you tell I'm grunty on this? I just wrapped up a couple weeks of iMac-shopping for my grandmother, so I hope I'm allowed. This is not a good time to buy -- give them a couple months to acknowledge that America is broke, or at least to refresh the line, correct the cheaping-out on the iMac displays, and remove the 3GB limit from the Mini. Right now so much of the Mac line is incompletely-baked that I think they're afraid to release it on clearance all at once -- even though it's certainly still usable enough that they'd see another spike in market share.)
...
Edit: This is silly -- I'm ashamed to even suggest it -- but since you already own the machine, it should be possible to bung one of those "use a bunch of DIMMs as a SATA disk" devices into a Firewire enclosure with minimal hackery.* This would be completely ridiculous, but at a total cost well below $200, you could set up a boot script to get your swapfile onto it (should be possible?) and use any remaining space as a scratch disk for Adobeware. The Mac sites, unaware of the possibility, would probably go gaga.
* Most of these are built to get their power from a PCI or PCI-E slot, so that, and the mechanical fit, would be the issue. You'd probably have to build a regulator to get 3.3v, or make sure the device's onboard one can function at 5.
