This mighty Quadra has a mighty strange (and ironic) feature: If you install all the RAM you can into it, 256MB, the RAM disk doesn’t work at all. A glitch in the circuitry can’t handle the creation of a RAM disk. That’s unfortunate because a RAM disk is one of the first things you’d think of if you had that much memory to play with!
The IIci’s clean little Secret
This has got to be the most secret Secret in this book.
The IIci — and only this one particular model — has a quirk involving 32-bit addressing. When it’s turned on, the IIci runs faster.
It makes no difference whether or not you’re using the extra memory promised you by 32-bit addressing. Even if you’ve got five megs, or eight megs, turning on 32-bit addressing gains you a one-percent average speed increase. We checked it ourselves with Speedometer, an extremely technical and accurate benchmarking program.
If you have a IIci, is it worth turning on 32-bit addressing to reap that one-percent speed increase? As long as you’re certain that every single one of your programs runs well with 32-bit addressing turned on, by all means. But if your system crashes even once because of this feature, we’ll wager that you’ve just lost whatever time you had gained from the extra speed.
If you have an older Mac, one that doesn’t require System 7.1 and an enabler, you can beat Systems 6 and 7 at their own games. Restart your Mac from a System 6 start-up disk. Then when you Get Info on your System 7 Finder icon, you will indeed see the memory boxes. And you can resize the Finder’s memory allotment.
