Improving Slowdowns

Which do you think would be more beneficial to getting rid of slowdowns on my C2D macbook, upgrading to a 7200RPM hard drive of upgrading to 2GB of RAM?

Thanks,
SamsungFTW

 

Wondering the same thing here. I have 1GB of ram now in my 2ghz C2D macbook.

I'm thinking the RAM for most of it. A larger HDD will help out with more room for the OS and files. But the 7200 RPM shouldn't add that much noticeable speed as many 5400 drives have close to the same seek speeds.

 

My wife's MB had 1 GB of RAM and a 80 GB drive. I noticed it was a bit pokey the other day while using it. I upped the RAM to 2 GB and that helped modestly, but not as much as I had hoped. I think the biggest bottleneck at least in my case is the slow HDD. It's a low capacity, slow rotation, drive that only has about 10 GBs of space remaining.

 

I upgraded to 2GB RAM and a 250GB 5400rpm HD (larger HDs also improve speed due to disk density). I don't experience any slowdowns until I start running virtual machines. But for me, the RAM was the one that made the bigger difference.

 

I can't answer your question but I can give my experience... I recently 'upgraded' from 2.33Ghz, 2Gb RAM, 5400 RPM running Tiger to 2.5Ghz, 4Gb RAM, 7200RPM running Leopard.

So far (around two weeks) I experience slowdowns much less frequently (not that they were a major deal in the first place, the upgrade was for various reasons). My main complaint before was when using Aperture and Photoshop simultaneously with other mulitasking, I quite often got the spinning balls of doom.

Things are much sharper now and the spinning balls are so far a thing of the past. Starting up photoshop from aperture also took a 'little' while but now is very fast indeed.

Part of this was also the upgrade from Aperture 1.5 to Aperture 2.0, which also had a very noticeable impact on performance.

My gut feeling is that the main reasons for the improvements I have noticed are (1) Aperture 2.0 and (2) the extra RAM, but I can't say for sure.

BTW I am really liking the 'look and feel' of Leopard

 

Well, each will help in different situations. More RAM will allow more programs to be running simultaneously without any stuttering, while a faster HD will reduce boot-up times and other access times. So basically...which "slowdowns" are you trying to reduce? The computer just bogging down as you open and use more programs, or just reducing the time between when you hit that button on the dock and when it stops bouncing?

 

More RAM - always.

 

If you run VMs more RAM is a must.

If you want to speed up Finder a tad a faster HD would help...but
Spending your money on RAM first would be the wise thing, you can always get a bigger and higher density HD later.