Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™ for Dummies®

Chapter 21. Ten Ways to Make Your Mac Better by Throwing Money at It

This is one of my favorite chapters. I love souping up my Macs. I live to find ways of working smarter, saving time or hand motion, and coaxing my Mac to do more work in less time. So it gives me great pleasure to share in this chapter my favorite top ten things that you can buy for your Mac to tweak it and make it faster, easier to use, and (I hope) more fun.

The items listed in this chapter are things I have, use every day, love dearly, and would (and probably will!) buy again.

RAM

RAM, or random-access memory, is your computer's primary working memory. The more you have, the smoother your Mac runs — period. If you have anything less than 2GB in your Mac, you'll like your Mac a lot better if you upgrade to 2GB or more. If you like to do more than a few things at the same time, more RAM will make you a much happier camper. (For what it's worth, RAM has never been cheaper than it is today — and it's worth every penny.)

I know I mention it in the previous chapter, but in addition to speeding up your Mac, more RAM makes using your Mac better in other ways. For example, when you have plenty of RAM, you can open many programs at the same time without a performance penalty. I have 3GB in my MacBook Pro. I almost always have the 15 or 20 programs I use most open at all times. Then all my favorite applications are available instantly, and I don't have to wait while a program launches.

Note

Right this moment, for example, I ...