2 GB RAM enough?

I've been contemplating upgrading my MBP to 3 or 4 GB of RAM, but I want to know if it's really necessary. I mostly use my system to surf the Web, work on office documents, and listen to music. The few games I play in OS X and Windows XP seem to do just fine. It also seems that Leopard is more efficient about how it uses RAM. Any input is appreciated.

 

Yeah i would say 2GB would be fine

 

All depends on your usage...

If you are me then 2GB is a joke... But that is because I have to run 2 or 3 VMs concurrently and they each need around 1GB of RAM each... If you aren't like me than maybe 2GB would suffice...

 

It depends on what applications you use. In your case, 2 gig seems plenty. I had 2 gigs, but it wasn't enough for running Photoshop, iGrabnews, iTunes and more at the same time, so I upgraded to 3 gigs and that seems enough for me.

 

Wow. Time to get yourself an 8 GB Mac Pro LOL.

The most I'd probably do is have VMWare running with my XP BootCamp partition with MS Office going, along with Firefox and iTunes running through OS X. Maybe throw in some iPhoto every once in a while, but that's about it.

 

Yea i think you should be fine with two gigs.

Maybe in a couple years you might wanna get more ram if you wanna play the newer games that come out, but for now you should be fine.

 

Depends on your needs. If you're constantly going to use Parallels or VMware Fusion, then best to have at least 2 GB and preferably more.

But if you're not going to do much virtualization, 2 GB is perfectly fine.

 

Man... since when did 2GB become too little? I was using a computer with 512MB up until a little over a year ago. I used to run VMs through it all the time, though they were usually just Linux. My parents' computer still has just 256MB.

To be honest, 2GB is great for Windows XP and OS X. Vista likes to have more, in which case an upgrade to 4GB would make more sense. Unless you do a lot of VM usage like frazell, or a lot of workstation stuff, 2GB is great for a regular user, or even a power user.

 

For your needs and use I think 2GB is plenty of RAM. If you have extra money to spend, get more RAM, but for what you use computer for I doubt you would notice much difference. Other people do need 4GB.

 

With the falling price of RAM (4 GB upgrade $150), why not take the plunge? Of course, it will only continue to fall, so the day will come that you can't stand the temptation.

 

Rawjamacian is right....and we are being tempted all the time!

 

Thank you! My sentiments exactly.

 

I agree with what Rawjamaican said. With the current prices there´s no real problem in going for 4 Gb. Which is btw. exactly what I´m going to do as soon as I have my MBP. So, yes, I absolutely go for 4 Gb which I would probably do even if prices would be higher...

 

The new RAM arrived from newegg - took all of three minutes to install. It's already a peppier machine, more noticable on the XP side, where I still run Photoshop CS3. Time to cross-platform!

 

Is upgrading memory on the MBP officially a "user-serviceable" upgrade, or would it void Applecare?

 

imho. 4gb should be enough. since 3rd party upgrades are cheap already

 

Upgrading the RAM in both the MBP and MacBook does not void the Apple warranty.