There are several pieces of hardware, called "peripherals", which you might at some point wish to add to your computer system. The most common ones are:
- a printer
- an external hard disk
- a backup device such as a tape drive or removable cartridge disk drive
For external storage devices, I generally recommend calling a company in Portland called La Cie (1-800-999-1741), which sells Quantum disk drives and a variety of other devices. I would NOT recommend their "Joule" SCSI device connector system, which has been seen to present problems and which is a proprietary system -- it locks you into buying additional devices from that one company, which is not a very good policy in any event.
Also, at some point, you'll probably want to add to your computer's memory by adding RAM. This is the bank of electronic memory chips inside the computer which are used to hold information while you're working with it -- like the documents and programs that you have opened up on your screen as you go about your daily business. As time goes on and programmers get sloppier, each new program tends to get bigger and require more memory. You can fight back by refusing to buy new versions of software that require more RAM than your computer has to offer, but eventually you'll find some program you really want to use which demands that you get more. The king of all RAM-hungry programs is PhotoShop; if you've used it, you're probably familiar with this issue.
You can do one of three things to expand the RAM in a Macintosh:
- buy and install more RAM chips
- turn on "virtual memory" in System 7
- buy RamDoubler
If you're short of memory, buying RAM is the solution which gives you the best performance. If you go this route, you'll be buying SIMM devices (single inline memory modules), either through the UW's computer maintenance division or from a mail-order catalog, and we should talk about which specific items are needed for your particular Macintosh.
Unfortunately, that solution is fairly expensive, since the price of RAM is the one thing in the world of computer hardware that has not gone down in price over the last few years. Because of this, there are software solutions to the problem. Both have snags; they use tricks to make it look like you've got more RAM than you actually do, and are both slower than real RAM and also may cause compatibility problems. They work best if you just want to have several programs open at once, because there's only a delay when you switch among tasks; if any one program requires more actual RAM than you have, though, you can expect delays at any time, which can hamper your ability to work. It can't hurt to try it out before you shell out several hundred dollars on new hardware, but you have to have conservative expectations.
If you're interested in the details of one of these three, select one from the list -- they should be active.