[JJRed613]

For those who have increased their RAM on a MacBook Pro from the standard 2 GB to 4 GB I was wondering if you have seen any significant benefits. This is really just more of an idea than something I will do very soon. I have the 2.2 Ghz, 160 GB HDD, Leopard flavor of the MBP. My "demanding" tasks are home video and picture editing, gaming, and using Vista (both with Boot Camp and Parallels).

Thank you in advance for your tips/advise!

-Jon

[smax013]

JJRed613 said:

For those who have increased their RAM on a MacBook Pro from the standard 2 GB to 4 GB I was wondering if you have seen any significant benefits. This is really just more of an idea than something I will do very soon. I have the 2.2 Ghz, 160 GB HDD, Leopard flavor of the MBP. My "demanding" tasks are home video and picture editing, gaming, and using Vista (both with Boot Camp and Parallels).

Thank you in advance for your tips/advise!


-Jon

You really potential for benefit is with Parallels running Vista. You can assign 2+ GB of RAM for use by the Parallels virtual machine and STILL have at least 1 GB or more for running Mac applications at the same time.



If you are doing complex picture editting with something like Photoshop (i.e. use of a lot of filters and other more advanced stuff), then more memory will definitely be handy.



It will probably also help Vista in Boot Camp. Vista is kind of RAM hungry and generally many consider 2 GB as the minimum for Vista if you are running Aero.

[Heyoka_Happiness]

Up-grading the RAM in our computers is probably the best investment we can make.

The graphics seem to work better with the RAM balanced out. meaning 2x 2gig chips or 2x 1gig chips. in there slots

You will need all the Ram for editing in FCP (depending on your media) and if you use Color or do any special effects 4 gig would be the minimum. Aperture recommends 1gig I would recommend aleast 2gigs
But what would really help is the higher end graphics card thats when you'll really see the difference if you don't already have it installed Aperture relies more on the video memory. As well as FCS

smax013 said:

If you are doing complex picture editting with something like Photoshop (i.e. use of a lot of filters and other more advanced stuff), then more memory will definitely be handy.

is right you can never go wrong with more memory

[MacosNerd]

For OSX, you'll definitely see an increase in performance. Because OSX will not need to swap out memory to the drive, thus improving overall performance. Be aware that because of limitations with windows, you will not be able to access the full 4 gig of ram in windows, regardless if its withing parallels or bootcamp. This is not a mac or osx issue, but rather a windows problem.

I bumped my ram from the 2gig to 4gig on my MBP and I incurred a nice bump in performance. I typically run VMWare fusion, aperture, photoshop, xcode.

[James_Dempsey]

As already stated, more RAM will help greatly because the OS won't have to swap as much info to your hard drive (storing it in RAM instead). This is particularly important on laptops for two reasons:

1. Your laptop most likely has a slower (5400RPM) drive in it. A slower drive means slower read/write into memory.

2. The more "work" your hard drive has to do, the faster the battery will drain.

Next to the kind of monitor your choose for a desktop Mac, RAM is probably the most important thing in having a pleasant computing experience.

[smax013]

Heyoka_Happiness said:

The graphics seem to work better with the RAM balanced out. meaning 2x 2gig chips or 2x 1gig chips. in there slots

This is due to most modern computers being able to take advantage of dual channel RAM. Using matched pairs of DIMMs will result in the computer to be more efficient in its ability to use/address the RAM.

[JJRed613]

I appreciate all of the responses. My question was really more geared towards the people that have already done this to their machines and if they really noticed a significant improvement or if it was just slight.

Thanks again!

[MacosNerd]

Look at my post again, I noted that I went from 2 to 4gig and yes I noticed a very nice increase in performance.

People cannot say flat out that the improvement will be earth shattering or a minor blip because we all run our computers differently.

for instance if you only use safari and mail.app but never together, I'd suggest the speed increase would be minimal at best.

More memory allows OSX to avoid swapping data to the hard drive which is slow compared to RAM. If you don't load a lot of programs in memory, i.e., multi-task or use demanding applications that require a high amount of ram. FCP, Aperture, Photoshop etc then you'll also not notice a huge increase.

That's why I mentioned what I use, parallels, aperture, photoshop all tend to be memory hogs and I typically have one or all opened at the same time, so the memory upgrade for me was more noticable then maybe someone else.

As always your mileage will vary.

[moose_n_squirrel]

JJRed613 said:

I appreciate all of the responses. My question was really more geared towards the people that have already done this to their machines and if they really noticed a significant improvement or if it was just slight.

That's like asking a guy whether it helped to move from a one-bedroom to a six-bedroom house. You can't get a good answer without knowing the guy.

If the guy is single, the large house didn't help and was an incredible waste of money because many rooms are empty.
If the guy is married with many children, it helped immensely and eased overcrowding.
The key is to understand that adding RAM never accelerates, it only makes more room. If RAM is the bottleneck, adding RAM helps. If RAM is not the bottleneck, adding RAM does not help.

As the other posts are saying, the improvement depends on what apps you typically run every day and their memory footprint. From your early post, it's probably going to help you when you are trying to run two operating systems on one computer at the same time. If you mostly run Vista in Parallels, then the 4GB will be absolutely necessary since Vista and OS X will each want a couple of GB and you will probably choke the machine if you only have 2GB. When you are only in one OS with simple apps running, with 4GB you may find that you have a lot of RAM sitting unused. If you are going to run Vista in Parallels a lot, you should get the 4GB.

[minischneides]

I personally don't have a Macbook Pro with 4GB of RAM. Though if you are looking to purchase the RAM I suggest buying it from Crucial (www.crucial.com). It is basically the same RAM that Apple uses with the exception that it is far cheaper then the RAM that Apple offers.

Take for example...

4GB of RAM from Crucial - http://crucial.com/s...F964EB5A5CA7304

4GB of RAM from Apple - http://store.apple.c...D?nclm=F295A333

Needless to say the price speaks for itself.

Hope that helped,

Thomas

[jcmount]

I have a MBP with the 2Ghz Core Duo and it's listed at 1GB per slot. I use it pretty hard and would like to bump up to 4GB. Is anyone running 4GB in a early MBP?