Ram upgrade, is it worth it?

Hi everyone,

I recently got my macbook pro 13 and am loving every minute of it, so much better than windows for me personally.

The mac was running really fast to start with with internet pages loading immediately on firefox. However, yesterday i installed office for mac and now things are loading more slowly, sometimes a 1-3 second delay while it loads.

Does anyone know if this is just something random or is it caused by installing office for mac? If it is caused by office for mac, would upgrading from 2gb to 4gb make webpages load faster? And generally make things more snappy on the mac?

I only use the laptop for office documents, internet browsing, movie watching and listening to music...so no intense video editing or any thing like that.

Any info would be gratefully received

Thanks

 

when you say "things" are you referring to webpages loading, programs loading or both?

 

going from 2 to 4 is not going to make stuff load faster, thats more or less your hard drive limiting you.

upgrading your hdd to a ssd would give you that instant loading you want.

That said a ram upgrade is usually cheap and cant hurt so if you can do it yourself for cheap may as well upgrade, but dont pay some outrageous mac fee to do it.

 

a faster hard drive will probably help more than extra memory. OS X runs quite well with 2 GB in my experience. it's enough for basic use.

a 320GB 7200rpm WD costs $69. good SSDs costs more and are faster.

 

thanks for the replys,

sorry by things i did mean webpages and applications like itunes.

would a 7200rpm HDD affect the battery life?As i want to get as much juice out as possible.

Thanks

 

I don't doubt that upgrading the HD to something faster (7200rpm or SSD) would make a noticeable difference in general performance but I also think Leopard's sweet spot is 4GB RAM, even though with 2GB everything runs fine.

In my experience I noticed a jump in general performance going from 2GB to 4GB RAM. But I think that also depends on the type of apps you use and how many you have running at one time. RAM is so cheap now that I don't think there's really a valid excuse for anyone to still be using only 2GB RAM except maybe for very basic use. Just my opinion. I wound't be too surprised if Apple's next round of hardware upgrades includes making 4GB the standard ram config on all things mac.

 

RAM is used by the system to store data for processing by a computer's central processing unit (CPU), also known as the processor. RAM stores the data in memory cells that are arranged in grids much like the cells are arranged in a spreadsheet, from which data, in the binary form of 1's and 0's, can be accessed and transferred at random to the processor for processing by the system's software.

The data stored in a hard disk drive (HDD) cannot be accessed at random. Whole sectors, containing blocks of data, are transferred from a hard disk drive, placed in a large swap file on the same drive, and only then are selected files transferred to RAM for random access by the processor, which is itself only performing the instructions of the system's operating system (usually Windows), and its application software.

Whenthe computer is turned off, all of the data in the RAM memory is lost, hence its alternative name of volatile memory, whereas all of the data on a hard disk drive is retained permanently until it is intentionally erased.

 

The WD3200BEKT would take a bit more power, maybe 10 minutes on 6 hours. But you'd work faster.

Or wait for the Hitachi 7K500 and Toshiba 500GB 7200rpm. They will be as power efficient as your current drive.

Exactly. For basic use I don't think you'll notice any difference. I never maxed out my RAM with 2 GB.