09-21-2008, 01:29 AM

I currently have 2 Gigs of ram in my MBP and I'm trying to determine if upgrading to 4 is worth the money. Regardless of the level of activity, will Leopard use more RAM if it has more RAM? When I had an iBook with only 640 MB, Tiger only used-AT MOST-600 MB. When I got the MBP, still with Tiger, it would use as much as 1.9 GB. If I get 4 GB, will the system use the additional RAM so that not so much needs to be run as slow virtual memory? My computer runs great now, but often I run XP on Fusion and I have a slowdown sometimes.

I have a fiance who has a (September 2007) MacBook with 1GB and a friend with a (2006) MacBook with only 512 MB. If I get the 4GB, I believe that I will be able to give my fiance my 2 GB and my friend the 1GB from my fiance's computer. Is this right?

Thanks for any insight you guys can provide.

09-21-2008, 06:00 AM

Yes OSX will use as much as you give it, and do more caching in RAM,

All those macs you mention use 667 Mhz PC2 5300 DDR2 memory, so you can donate your old ram to those who need it

09-21-2008, 03:19 PM

Thanks! I appreciate that.

09-28-2008, 09:41 PM

I received and installed my new RAM last Wednesday. I've been very pleased with it, but I have a new question. Is it normal for OS X to convert inactive memory to free memory? My computer has been running for 16 hours, and a little bit ago, my "free memory" jumped from a few hundred megabytes to 2.87 GB. It was not preceded by closing a bunch of applications or any other activity at all. I was just doing some websurfing and the computer slowed down for perhaps 15 seconds (beach balled), and then iStat menu reported the change in free memory and everything is fine.

Is this normal?

09-29-2008, 06:38 PM

bump