RAM advice?

Hello everyone,

I have the late 2008 macbook 13 inches aluminum model and my specs are core 2 duo 2 Ghz with 2 gb ram and 160 gb hdd. I am using lion and after upgrading from snow leopard to Lion, I feel that my computer has slowed down especially when I start it and shut down. I was wondering that if I increase my ram from 2 gb to 4 gb, will I experience a significant change in the speed or should i switch back to SL as I kinda liked the speed in SL more? It even sometimes takes a bit longer to open simple softwares so thats why I miss my old speedy mac.

I would really appreciate your help everyone.

Thank you.

Ram upgrade may increase the speed slightly but probably not extremely noticeably. That's just IME.

Many users feel that Lion uses more ram than snow leopard does so it could be the problem. Though it's doubtful that it would help your boot time as I think that has to do with the speed of the harddrive, it would be a good idea to upgrade your ram. I think the 2008 version supports up to 8gb of ram which you can buy for about $50 at owc.

Hackintosh said:

Many users feel that Lion uses more ram than snow leopard does so it could be the problem. Though it's doubtful that it would help your boot time as I think that has to do with the speed of the harddrive, it would be a good idea to upgrade your ram. I think the 2008 version supports up to 8gb of ram which you can buy for about $50 at owc.

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When I upgraded to my 750GB 7200rpm hard drive from a 250GB 5400rpm my boot time seemed to have increased. Meaning it now takes longer to boot. Why do you think this is? I did a clean install of Lion and then Migrated all my files from the other hard drive using another MacBook.

Hmm I really have no idea on that one, the 7200rpm should be faster. If you want super fast boot times though, you might want to invest in a SSD as their boot times are much faster.

Hackintosh said:

Hmm I really have no idea on that one, the 7200rpm should be faster. If you want super fast boot times though, you might want to invest in a SSD as their boot times are much faster.

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Thanks. I've thought about the SSD upgrade but not really worth the price for me. I deal with a slightly slower boot.

Thanks everyone for your help.
If thats really the case then I guess I should consider switching back to SL. I am quite used to Lion now so its a tough decision since I am accustomed to the new gestures plus I like the full screen apps but the thing is even sometimes opening safari can take a bit longer which kinda annoys me as I always loved macs over pcs for their amazing blazing speeds. Multi-tasking at times also becomes a bit sluggish. I would highly appreciate if you guys could give me some other suggestions about these issues.

Thank you.

My suggestion would to just keep Lion and upgrade to 8gb of ram. From what other people who have had your problem have said, it helps a ton.

I am not sure if my model has compatibility for 8 GB ram as I read somewhere that it only supports till 4 Gb but I can be wrong too. Plus, other than that my budget doesn't allow me to spend that much money. Since, I am from Pakistan and people import such stuff at higher import duties and taxes thats why the usual electronics stuff is a bit costly compared to the prices abroad.

Apple always lists the ram maximum at lower than what it actually is. 2011+ MBP can actually use 16gb of ram while apple says the max is 8. The 2008 versions can support up to 8. I'm not sure about the system your country uses, but I do know that Amazon ships to Pakistan if your talking about the retailers in your area being more expensive. You could also upgrade to 4gb of ram for about $25 if you wanted to.