RAM Question

This might sound stupid but does haing less memory shorten the life-span of a computer or fry anything? Haha, I worry too much.

It's not stupid.

By itself, RAM doesn't affect computer life, all other things being equal. Truth is, however, that all things aren't equal. If you don't have enough RAM to run your applications, your system can go into "paging", trying to use the hard disk for virtual memory. It's often called thrashing, where the computer keeps reading and writing to the hard disk. It's not a really good thing for the hard drive, and in theory can stress the drive.

I don't know what you've got, but a MacBook running OS X 10.4, for instance, can run on 512M of RAM but does better typically on 1GB. 2GB is useful if you run lots of memory hungry applications at the same time, but isn't particularly necessary if you're not using all of the RAM at the same time.

Hope this helps!

mathogre is right, having less RAM means the computer has to access the hard drive more often. Though to be honest, the difference isn't that drastic.

Having more RAM also means you'll have a slightly longer battery life since your hard drive will be spinning up less often. Again, it's a small gain, but for some people, every minute counts.

That's a great post mathogre!

Thanks for that, I'm looking at a Mac Mini. I'll probably go for 1GB RAM since all I'll be doing on it is storing/listening to music and using the internet. Will it do fine with 1GB?

Hope someone can help with my above question?

My imac was fine with its standard ram but then was a hole lot better when I added more.
Mines now got 1.25gb so 1gb should be fine but if you can get a bit more then Id go for as much as is affordable incase you change what you use it for.

Thanks again.