[poetofzwan]

Hey everyone,

I just got a Dell Mini 10v yesterday and I have install Mac OS X on it.

So far I am loving it, but being new to Mac OS X, I think performance could be a little better if I could find a way to scale back some of the graphical effects etc.

I was wondering if anyone could tell me some of the speed tweaks they have been using to make their Dell Mini 10v a little faster with Mac OS X.

Furthermore, is is safe for me to install 10.6.1 upgrade? Does it have any noticeable benefits?

[bmcclure937]

I do not have any performance problems running OSX normally...

and 10.6.1 is fine to upgrade

[poetofzwan]

Did you find that the 2gb upgrade helped a lot?

[Samuel]

Even though your not asking me i would like to butt in and say that 2gigs of ram is alot more ram than 1gig. In theory you can run 2x as many programs but only if they dont max out your cpu usage. If your looking for a performance boost upgrade to 2gigs of ram for now.

[underwhelmed]

Most don't want to upgrade their ram, as you have to totally disassemble your 10v to do it.

1 gig works perfectly well in the 10v, I haven't seen many complaining or having issues with 1 gig.

In fact, I have seen a few posts where posters have commented on the fact that the upgrade did not seem to make a difference in their performance.

[Akki]

On the 9 the upgrade is trivial so I did it. I found the memory for ~20$ so I'm happy with it. But it didnt make a glaring performance change.

[Aristizzle]

I got the mini 10v as cheap escape from my iMac desktop, mostly to work on my diss at the library or coffee shop. A couple of desires conflict for me: I speedstep and throttle when I can to keep the 10v cool and the battery life optimally long, but the word processor I use (and LOVE so I won't be switching to another) Nisus Word Pro appears to be quite the resource hog on the mini 10v and so I turn off the throttling when using it. So my question is, rather than upgrading the RAM, what can I tweak on the OS to free up memory to keep Nisus from running slow and heating up my mini (actually, I think the mini heats up and then Nisus slows down now that I think about it)? I've disabled dashboard and got rid of any login start up apps. Will disabling spotlight help? Any suggestions?

[Thorsteenster]

I did the 2GB RAM upgrade before installing OS X, granted I don't use it all that often, it's snappy when I do. I've never spent much time on a real Mac so I can't compare Apples to Apples, but compared to oranges I'm happy with it's performance. I installed WOW on mine over the weekend, and the FPS is kinda low, but l
ooks good and runs well, also playing with iMovie and Garage Band it runs well. My biggest gripe would have to be the screen size and not being able to see entire windows, but I've plugged it into my 21" LCD and everything's groovy.

[nobo_mini]

Originally Posted by Aristizzle

Nisus Word Pro appears to be quite the resource hog on the mini 10v and so I turn off the throttling when using it. So my question is, rather than upgrading the RAM, what can I tweak on the OS to free up memory to keep Nisus from running slow and heating up my mini

The obvious question, and maybe solution: did you kill all apps that are not needed, or at least restart them?

Safari and Firefox can be resource hogs (297MB real, 468 virtual for Safari for morning's use; Firefox was eating about same real, 200-something virtual and did not do much with it; Firefox on restart and only displaying a Yahoo! mail screen is eating 87MB real, 72MB virtual). Mail app is a hog as well. Flash is eating 9MB real, 36 virtual. Something as simple as Google Notifier is eating about that same amount.

Point is, all the little stuff adds up. You don't need it right then, kill it, otherwise that box could be memory swapping a great deal.

[formerglory]

Maybe you could try using a program like XSlimmer or Monolingual to strip out the old PowerPC legacy code from the Universal Binaries and other parts of the OS? I found that it gave me back much needed space on my DM9 and real Macs, and gave me a bit of a performance increase on the 9.

Less bloat is always a good thing.