Category: Geeks r Us
Hello zoners, Sarah here. I have a couple questions since I'm getting a Macbook Air in a week. How many gigs should I get, I have the option of getting 128 or 256 gigs, but how do I find out if that's how much Ram it has or the amount of internal storage it has? I will be a brand-new Mac user, so that's why I ask. And another question, I was using a Mac the oter day at best buy so I can learn it more, and I was in the Vo help menu and it said to go left a page it Safari to press Control Option Shift Page Down. The problem is the keyboard didn't have a page down key. So what do I do in that situation? Thanks in advance for all the help.
Hi. That's the amount of internal storage - no Mac has that much RAM. You get
page down by holding down the fn key (bottom left on the keyboard) and
pressing down arrow.
it depends. if you are just going to be using the mac for basic things, I would go with 120 gigs of storage. if you do a lot of music and you like to hord files and things, I would suggest 256 gigs. I believe any mac should have a drive connected to it for extra storage and backup, but that is just me.
I would recommend you go for the 128GB SSD instead of 256 & spend any left over money on going to 8GB of RAM instead of 4 which is the default. A lack of storage can be made up for by using an external drive, but if you find yourself running out of RAM you'll be buying a new computer.
yeah, I have a MacBook air 13 inch with 4 gigs and that's all I need. externals are good to have. I told you the other day that I'd help you out in any way I can.
So I can't get get a ram upgrade? Mine has 256 gigs of space on the hard drive.
I agree ram over storage.
Storage is cheap and easy to add.
If you can upgrade processor, do that as well.
No, no RAM upgrades and realisticly no storage upgrades either. It's not quite as straight forward for older machines, but as of the time of writing, if you buy a portable from Apple the RAM will be soldered to the board. Additionally, depending on exactly what you buy, the SSD will either be soldered to the board or will be a proprietary device meaning that upgrades are more or less nonexistant.
NB: I know a couple of people in data recovery companies & the way that they recover these proprietary Apple drives is by buying a working laptop and just putting the drive in it. If you're good (really good) with hardware you can workout a pinout and make yourself an adaptor, but if you have to outsource development like that it works out cheaper to just buy a used computer.
How lovely of Apple.
Keeps the money flowing. Smile.
Thanks for the help everyone. I don't hoard files a lot and I will mostly be using it for music, games sucs as Rs Games and movies from the blind mice movie vault. If the RAM gets full, is there a way to erase what is taking up the RAM or not, would I just have to buy a new computer?
Ram doesn't get full in that sense, that is the memory your computer uses when it's running programs and the like. You should never use up all your ram.
Right, no need to worry about ram. It is only used when you are doing something.
It doesn't fill up like the drive.
Hi,
I'll try to explain what RAM is & what it does. It might not sound like it relates to computers at all but stick with it:
Let’s say that you're an accountant and you're having to read & write lots of papers; the company you're working for is still living in the last century and doesn't have any computers so you won't be dealing with any electronic documents. Typically, you'll have your desk where you store things that you're working on & for all the other things that you don't need right at this moment, you'll have a filing cabinet at your disposal to file them away.
When you want to do the yearly accounts for a company, you would take all the documents relating to said company out of your cabinet and put them on your desk and leave them there until you are done doing the accounts. The reason why you would leave them on your desk is because putting them back and taking them out of the cabinet every single time you wanted to read them takes quite a long time, so it's just much quicker to have them all laid out on your desk for however long you need to use them for.
Time passes and you start taking on larger clients. One day you start to do the accounts for a company, but they have so many documents you need to read that you can't fit them on your desk all at once. Instead, you have to keep on going back & forth between your desk and cabinet which really slows things down. You get the job done eventually, but it takes you much longer than it usually would do for any of your other companies because of the time taken to travel between the desk and cabinet.
You ask your boss for a larger desk to speed things up. Unfortunately, because of the poor design of the building, there's absolutely no way that they can give you one so you just have to make do. Annoyingly, some of your other accountant friends have been running into the same problem but they were able to solve it by buying another desk.
In this instance the desk is RAM and the cabinet is a hard drive. Let’s go through what happens inside your computer when you do something:
When you want to access something - edit a document in Pages for example, the relevant information is read from your hard drive and loaded into RAM. This happens because compared to RAM, all types of hard drive are incredibly slow. So slow in fact that it makes sense for computers to have a small amount of super-fast memory (RAM) that can be used to store whatever the user is doing. Once you're done with the document and pages, the document is saved back to your hard drive and removed from the RAM to make way for the next thing that you want to do.
The more RAM you have the more things you can load into RAM at any one time. If you're doing multiple things at once, if you only have a small amount of RAM all the things that would be temporarily stored in the RAM might not fit, so the computer just lodes them from the hard drive every time they need to be used. As I said above, comparatively speaking, your hard drive is quite slow, so in this situation your computer will also be running quite slowly.
The MacBook Air doesn't allow you to upgrade your RAM, so if you start doing things that need more RAM than you have, you'll either have to tolerate the slowness or buy a computer. In contrast, most PC's allow you to upgrade the memory which gives the system a new lease of life.
HTH.
Really good. Lol.
That was a really good explanation, now I understand the RAM on a mac. When I first get my Mac, how do I find out if th keyboard is set up for accessibility or not? I heard some Mac's have a setting by default where you have to press the FN key every time you do a VO command.
yes, in most cases especially for macbooks, you will have to press the fn key along with other keys to do various things, like for pressing home and end, page up and down, and there is a setting in system preferences where you can set your f keys ot perform software functions and not hardware functions. again, i'll do my best to help you if you like, just pm me or something with some contact info that way I can try to help you better.
Ok, and how do you download a dmg file on a Cac and drop it in to the applications folder?
you have to use safari and download it that way. when it's done downloading, it will show up in your downloads folder. click on show in finder. you will need to use ctrl option shift spacebar for that. then, you open the dmg file. then when you open the dmg file, you look for the.app extention. if it's not shown, you will have to change it to show extentions in finder preferences. anyway, after you find the.app of whatever file your looking for, you coppy that with command c, then you press command shift and A, to get into your applications folder. then you press command v to paste the .app file you want and then you just run it. again, if you need more help from me just pm or something with contact info and i'll do what I can for you.
Ok thanks!! Now I will know how to install Skype tomorrow night I'm so excited.
hey no problem. just note, when you get skype chat messages, you will have to
use voiceover to read them, there is nothing that you can install to make the
system voice read them, I use an older version of skype that has growl support,
one of the last versions.
What is growl?
it's an older notification system that is sort of like windows in a way, Skype used to support that until apple created the notification senter
Another question, if I install Adobe flash player on my mac and decide I don't waq it anymore, how do I delet it? I tried sending it to the trash, and using AppDelete to get rid of it, but it's not working. Flash Player still shows up in system preferences and that wasn't on there until I installed the stupid thing.