Mo' Ram

I've been working some lately with DB2. The worst thing about DB2, at least for a Mac-totin' developer, is that DB2 is not (yet) available for OSX. So what to do? I already had Vista installed on my MacBook via Boot Camp. So I installed DB2 on there and ... developed under Windows. Ugh. Running DB2 and Eclipse at the same time often resulted in not only a slow computer, but Eclipse stack overflows and out of memory errors. Funny how I never had such problems on OSX.

Once that project was done, I decided to upgrade the memory on my MacBook. The max it handles is 2GB (I had the 1 GB that was stock) so I went with that. So where to get the 2GB? Well there is always Apple @$300. Ouch. A better choice is Newegg, of course. For a change though, I found an equally good deal at Fry's, just up the road from my office. 2x1GB sticks of Patriot RAM for $65.

Now it was time to install the RAM. I am always quick to tell people that I am a software guy, not a hardware guy. However, Apple makes it really easy to install RAM on the MacBook. It took me like ten, maybe fifteen minutes total to upgrade the RAM. It could not have gone smoother.

The extra memory has inspired me to give Parallels a try. So far the results are mixed. Every time it launches, I get a message form Parallels saying it is installing Parallels Tools. Then Windows crashes (blue screen.) It reboots and seems ok, but it's still aggravating that it does this every time...