Machine Speed And Ram, How much is enough?/Best? Options

[charlieb]

Hi folks,
In regard to machine speed, is buying THE fastest Tibook going to give me a noticeable performance improvement?
I think that there is about a $400 difference between the fastest machine out there and the second fastest, and I was wanting to know if the extra money is well spent.

Am I going to want to get a Gig of RAM or is less than this quite OK?
I know RAM is quite cheap now, but I am wanting to more know if a lot of RAM is a big help or not.

Thanks,
charlie

[Bart S.]

No, RAM is not the most important thing (unless when working with soft sound modules such as Kontakt which uses RAM... but which should get upgraded in a few months so that it will use streaming as most sound modules actually do). Processor speed and HD access is more important.
I'm personnaly working with 512M without any troubles (PT,DP, Reason, lots of plugs, Kontakt, Plugsounds,...).
RAM is basically used to make your applications+OS run... To get my point, just take a look in any Mac's "About this Computer" menu (open different app. before checking).
The OS generally takes between 60 to 100RAM depending on what applications are opened and what OS is being used, audio apps generally take around 50 to 80(already a lot) RAM and their engine (PT's DAE for example) takes about the same.
Now, if you need to have lots of apps opened at the same time 1GHz could be helpful.
Hope that helped