Yay! Memory!
Decided to wander into NextByte to see about getting some more ram for my nice new iBook today. I’ve been tossing up whether to go for an extra 512MB (for 768MB total) or an extra GB (for 1280MB total) — I really wanted as much as possible, since OS X is a memory hog and I want to run virtual hosts on it too; but I couldn’t justify paying three times as much for twice as much memory. In particular, when I rang a few weeks ago, I was quoted something like $600 for memory, and $500 for a copy of VirtualPC with a copy of Windows XP Pro I didn’t want. Yick.
So anyway, I finally got fed up with 256MB, and decided it was time to, well, decide. So as I wandered past the shelves, I noticed the pretty boxes Microsoft has for VirtualPC, and in particular noticed they had Windows 2000 and Windows XP Home variants. They also had a “standalone” variant, that doesn’t include a Windows license! Woot! Also woot-worthy is that the price of a GB had tumbled to only around twice the cost of 512MB. So I said “yay, gimme, gimme”, and got the RAM installed there and then, and got told that the (shrinkwrapped) VirtualPC box was display only (ie, completely empty) and they’d order it in. So, soon I shall have some active Debian and Ubuntu development installs again. Sweet.