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Mac Secrets |
Mac Secrets and other useful information:
By now most of you have had your Macintoshs for most of the summer, and are now learning how to make best use its functionality. Here are a few hints which will make the MAC more productive for you.
Get lots and lots of memory, hopefully you now have about 2560K bytes of memory in your MAC SE and about 5120K bytes in your MAC II. If you only have 4096K bytes in your MAC II talk to XXXX about getting the other 1024K back, they may have mistakenly removed it when they put in the additional 4096K bytes of extra memory. In fact you can put 4096K in an SE and 8192K in an MAC II. Thus if you can't run all the applications you want to under MULTIFINDER, then you should look at getting another 2048K for an SE and 4096K for a MAC II.
To find out how much memory you have, in the FINDER select "About the FINDER" from the menu. This action will get you the following dialog box:
Total memory: Tells you much memory you have installed.
Largest Unused Block: Tells you how much memory is free. This value will decrease if you launch another application, use any desk accessories, or do background printing.
In this example we have MULTIFINDER turned ON. To turn MULTIFINDER ON select "SET STARTUP...." from the "SPECIAL" menu in the FINDER ,turn MULTIFINDER ON, then restart your MAC.
The other pertinent information supplied by About the FINDER dialog box, is how much memory is dedicated to each active application, and how much ithe application is really using. For example "WORD" has been allocated 384K bytes of memory and seems to be using about 95% of that (the light gray areas signify free memory). But how did your MAC know that WORD needed 384K bytes of memory?
Under MULTIFINDER an application is given a block of memory based on its profile. You may have lots of memory in your MAC but still can experience memory shortage problems within a running application. When you launch an application it uses the APPLICATION MEMORY SIZE as shown below.
You can change the APPLICATION MEMORY SIZE by highlighting the application in the FINDER and select "GET INFO" from the "FILE" menu. In this example EXCEL is customized to use 325K of memory. If you are getting "Short of memory" or "Out of Memory" messages in EXCEL when running under MultiFinder, you should change the APPLICATION MEMORY SIZE to a larger number.
How Large? Depends on your requirements, but be forewarned that EXCEL V1.5 can only use about 1300K of memory, V2.0 should support 4096K. If MULTIFINDER cannot get the memory required it will use the SUGGESTED MEMORY SIZE which usually is the minimum required for the application to run correctly.
In summary. You may have lots of memory under MultiFinder but still experience application memory problems unless you correctly customize the applications, for your workload. Also some applications will run much better if you give them more memory, for example WORD seems to work much better when given a memory size of 500K.
Selected via the "Chooser" from the menu , this allows you to print hardcopy in the background. It allows you to do other things on your MAC while you wait for a document to print.
Secret III. Using RAM Cache
Selected via the "Control Panel" from the menu , this option allows you to speed up access to and from your Hard Drive. The amount of storage you should give it is depended on how much memory you are willing to give up from general application usage. You should turn RAM Cache ON and give it at least 96K bytes of memory, if you have extra memory installed then increase it a few hundred K bytes. You should notice a remarkable improvement on starting up a MAC when the RAM Cache is ON.
SUMMARY
By following the above hints, you can make better use of the memory in your macintosh, make things run faster, and be more productive.
John M McIntosh
88/10/01