Is it worth an additional $175 to upgrade the memory from 1GB to 2GB?

Upgrading to 2GB memory is absolutely worth it (but shop around a bit to see if you can find a better price -- I'm not sure what the going rate is, but Apple's memory upgrades are notoriously overpriced.)

Oh trust me, she's heard the excuse. We still don't have a new TV. She also doesn't see how a 50" TV would be SO much better than the one we have.

This is why I subscribe to this thread. Turn my back for a second and pricey electronics conspiracies crop up.

Is it worth an additional $175 to upgrade the memory from 1GB to 2GB?

I'd say it depends on what apps you run. I have 2GB on my MacBook - most of the time I have two-thirds of that free. Currently I'm using 19.1% of the available memory. But when I use Parallels and run XP on top of OS X, suddenly I'm using 2/3 of the memory. Running XP and Linux at the same time with Parallels I come close to using all the memory. Of course, virtual machines are notorious memory hogs. I suppose if you run a good graphics program the extra memory would come in handy too. Definitely get the 2GB if you're gonna be editing video.

So, Opera users (that is... ita). I'm trying this thingy out, as Camino is starting to show its age (it hasn't seen an engine upgrade in a while) and if I'm going to try something new, why not try Opera? So far, it seems pretty nifty, but... I want to emulate the Camino/Firefox/Safari interface by putting my "Personal Bar" underneath my "Address Bar." rather than at the very top. I can't figure out how to make that happen. Any ideas?

Gris, that's never occurred to me. Let me have a looksee.

Damn. I missed the most awesome deal on a laptop at Sony's outlet site. And I knew it was an awesome deal and I should have just jumped on it and asked permission from the board afterwards. Damn.

Okay, my computer just did this thing -- where it went to blue screen and told me that if it was the first time this happened I should restart, but if it had happened before I needed to do something. The message said something about a "device driver."

1. What is a device driver?

2. Messages from microsoft tell me how to get to the device driver but I have no idea how to figure out which thing is the one I need to do something about -- is there somewhere to go to figure that out?

I haven't loaded any new hardware and I think that the latest program I downloaded was an update of McAfee. I'm running Windows XP.

Thanks!

Gris, I think I used to rearrange some of the tool bars in Opera pretty easily, since if you right-click on the bar (not an icon) you should get a menu that includes placement choices. But this is from memory as I use Opera at work and I'm on Firefox at the present.

(Still, I find Opera pretty nifty, enough that I haven't bothered to try out other choices on the work machine just yet.)

I get a "Customize" option that takes me to a menu, but the only choices are "Top" "Bottom" "Left" and "Right". If you have two things on the top, I can't figure out how to put one on top of the other.

I did manage to add a button to turn images on and off on the fly to my main toolbar, which is jazzin'.

Ooh, Opera's built-in bittorrent client is pretty cool. Though I'll probably try to convince it to use Azureus for larger downloads than the teensy one I'm getting now.