Upgrades 12 Days Later

I have used the iBook for 12 days since I installed the RAM and HDD upgrades. I feel that I can now give a much better overall impression about how much better the notebook works, since shortly afterwards you really cannot "do everything" to see how quickly it goes. Also, people tend to wear rose coloured glasses when reviewing things they just purchased. Most certainly, disk-bound operations run noticeably faster. You really notice these sorts of things in places you least expect it. For example, mounting disk images and installing applications happens in a fraction of the time these operations used to take. For example, the final step in my custom build script mounts an existing FuzzMeasure DMG file, moves the application bundle over to the DMG, and then converts the DMG to a compressed image. This operation used to take a noticeable amount of time in the order of 5 seconds. Now, the operation feels almost instantaneous! The RAM increase certainly made a large difference in how responsive my iBook feels when moving between many open applications. In general, I do not get impatient when my computers take a while to complete certain intensive operations, but I certainly appreciate spending less time waiting for operations to complete. My debugging sessions have certainly grown far more productive now that Xcode can launch the debugger more quickly than before. Also, the time between a breakpoint getting hit and the code showing up on the screen has reduced considerably (although it still takes far longer than I feel it should). Returning to the issues of heat and noise, I think I can give a much better impression after spending some quality time with the iBook lately (implementing smoothing in FuzzMeasure). First off, the heat of the HDD certainly doesn't hit the maximum that the old HDD reached, but I find it gets hot much quicker than the old drive. In terms of noise, the new HDD has a much different overall sound than the old HDD. The old HDD seemed to have a high-pitched whine when it spun, where the new HDD has a more breathy sound. Also, the old HDD had a far louder seek noise. I think the breathy sound of the new HDD sounds louder than the old high-pitched whine, but the sound itself does not bother me as much, where the whine got a little annoying. In the end, my new upgrades went well. The iBook now runs a lot better than it used to, and I think that any improvement, no matter how minor, can make a big difference on a machine you use so often.