I recently started to notice that I’m having an awful shortage of RAM after upgrading to the latest version of iTunes. I remember back when I was using 6.x iTunes used no more than around 30 MB of RAM. Now that I have an iPod touch, I have to upgrade to 7.6. I don’t mind upgrading at all. As a matter of fact I am an upgrade freak. But when that upgrade causes the program to use 200MB of RAM, that’s an issue. My specs are:

* Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 4.0GHz
* 4GB Crucial Ballistix Low Latency RAM
* nVIDIA GeForce 9800GTX * 2
* 6356 Songs with around ~85% with Cover Art

I use Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and Dreamweaver… frequently simoultaneously. And I can’t have software hogging up already scarce RAM.

How is everyone else’s RAM usage using iTunes 7?

A few nights ago, I needed to get a couple Promise FastTRAK SATA RAID cards because my onboard ones just weren’t cutting it. I connect them to my PCI32 3.3V slots, boot up my system, and it goes through the whole detection process for my JBOD disks. Then it tells me that there is not enough Optional ROM space to continue…. WHAT?! I mean this is a $500+ board we are talking about here! Not enough space?! Give me a break.

I was running BIOS version 1.03, and there didn’t seem to be any fixes related to the BIOS looking at the updates, but I decided to upgrade to 1.05 just for the hell of it.

No Luck.

I tried disabling all the on-board features (SATA, SCSI, MAC PXE OptROM), and it still errored out on me. Why should I even have to try that on a high-end, server-class board.

No Luck.

I ended up taking one card out, configuring the RAID, and switching the cards and configuring the other one. Then I put both cards in, disabled the OptROM Boot Error Check, and just living with the issue. But why should a board of this class have issues like this? I’m seriously tempted to phone Tyan to get a replacement board or some kind of solution for their crappy-ass quality control.

Brennan