MBA RAM not upgradeable? Bummer.

Bought my wife an 11" MBA, and it rocks and she LOVES it. However, she plays those insipid YoVille games and crap, and the 2GB RAM is WOEFULLY short to handle it. Her page-outs are insane and she sees the beach ball a lot. Too bad ya can't upgrade, I may have bought her a MBP had I known this. Anyhow, I just told her to reboot more often than she was, I'm rockin' 8GBs so I don't bother. ;D

Sorry to hear about that!

Yeah...this is a fairly "camouflaged" aspect of the MacBook Airs (and a bit of a drawback)...but this is actually the way it has been with all MacBook Air's since 2008.

Too bad you didn't post here first before buying...we usually try to make potential buyers "keenly" aware of the non-upgradeable ram aspect of the MacBook Air's.

Great advice you gave your wife about rebooting more often!

- Nick

p.s. BTW...I upgraded my wife's MacBook to 8 gig a couple weeks ago. After reading this thread I asked her what her "Page-outs" and "Swap Used" were. Usually they are both zero (especially since she now has 8 gig)...but even with 8gig...eventually the Page-Outs & Swap start to grow...and she has some of each now. I told her to reboot when she feels like it....to get them back to zero.

And again, though most here did not agree with me on my post about short-sheeting RAM, this does speak to my opinion that Apple *does* under-power the RAM in their machines. Don't care, love mah Macs (3 in the house now), but they definitely RAM-starve off the shelf. It's just a fact, nothing to get any panties in a wad about.

Edited to add: upon a reboot, just "existing" uses 1.2 GBs of the 2 provided. So yeah, let's not defend 2 being adequate. Again, don't care, it runs great and does what it was bought for and FAR BETTER than her previous (HP) high-end notebook. So we're happy!

When did you get the MBA? There's a 14 day return policy, which they'll be happy to extend up to a month or maybe more.. especially if you want to upgrade. No fee for doing so, aside from paying extra of course, for the upgrade price.

Doug

^^^ I'd try that. And with the way Safari and FF both chew through RAM like there's no tomorrow, 4GB is practically an essential now. Wow, never thought I'd say that.

bobtomay said:

^^^ I'd try that. And with the way Safari and FF both chew through RAM like there's no tomorrow, 4GB is practically an essential now. Wow, never thought I'd say that.

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Yup. Funny, I started a thread a few weeks ago about Apple short-sheeting RAM and most responses chastised me and pointed out how wrong I was. ;D

One thing that might help is the free app from the app store called Free memory. Think it was a paid app at some point. I'm new to Mac's and was playing in the app store a couple of days ago and found this. Easy to use and seems to work great.

Max

bobtomay said:

^^^ I'd try that. And with the way Safari and FF both chew through RAM like there's no tomorrow, 4GB is practically an essential now. Wow, never thought I'd say that.

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And with that, because your wife has tabs open, get her to quit Safari/FF more often than rebooting. With the 10.7.2 update i have found Safari not getting over 400mb in the Safari Web Content so i havnt had leaks yet ..... Touch wood.

Cheers

..... Touch wood.

Cheers

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I giggled. . ... Yeah, I'm not very mature.

I'm confused. 2GB should be MORE than enough to play such time-wasting Flash games. I've got 3GB in mine (can't upgrade beyond that for this model) and I do all kinds of RAM-centric stuff, don't really have a problem with slowdowns ...

chas_m said:

I'm confused. 2GB should be MORE than enough to play such time-wasting Flash games. I've got 3GB in mine (can't upgrade beyond that for this model) and I do all kinds of RAM-centric stuff, don't really have a problem with slowdowns ...

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Don't really have that issue on my older MBP that can only see 3GB either. The new MBA meanwhile is using ~1.5GB memory on boot up. Running nothing but Activity Monitor, Mail and Safari - after 4 hours it is quite normal to see free memory well under 100MB of the 4GB in the machine. Try launching Steam and play Civ5 without quitting Safari at that time - it ain't happnin'.

To your point bobtomay, simply "existing" seems to utilize 1.5 GB of RAM. Now again, I bought the machine I bought, bought it as a step-up to the iPad she wanted, but I knew she'd want more, and it does it's job just fine. But it is sort of frustrating to bog down for no good reason, doing "normal" stuff what womerns do. Heck, like I said, it's the derned flash-silly games that do it, plus her penchant for MULTIPLE windows open. I am getting her to change her habits to help. But anymore, 4 GB simply ought to be "entry level". It just should. Here's two screen shots: the first is the Actiity Monitor right upon opening, maybe one of you pros can tell me if there's anything running that ought not be that's contributing. The next is a little harder to glean info from, but it's an XRG shot after I dined around with the machine for a while. Heck, I gave her APS CS3 and even *IT* doesn't tweak the MBA like those insipid FB games.

Activity Monitor:


XRG:


If any of you have something to teach me to help her, other than rebooting more often and STOP HAVING 87 WINDOWS OPEN, lemme know!

Basically your screwed, as you say 2GB aint cutting it, combo of lion and safari alone will kill you after a few hours the way safari leaks memory. Maybe see what its like with Firefox 8, its supposed to have fixed its memory issues with this version.

Buy an application called 'CleanMyMac' - It deletes any junk in your system that you don't need and won't effect any personal files. To give you an example of how good it is:



As you can see, I've cleaned over 21GB from my system, only used it about 20 times.

iOSTom said:

Buy an application called 'CleanMyMac' - It deletes any junk in your system that you don't need and won't effect any personal files. To give you an example of how good it is.

Click to expand...

I would honestly stay away from CleanMyMac as we have seen problems with it and in particular the process that ALWAYS runs and bloats CleanMyMacHelperApp process.
If you are looking for a better App this one is work $9.95 and i would of payed double for it is DaisyDisk - Analyze disk usage and free up disk space on Mac.

Cheers

Why pay for Disk Daisy when you can get InventoryX for free? Disk Inventory X

Does the same thing, just isn't as pretty. As for Clean my Mac.. yuck. Don't do it.

Doug