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I'm considering an upgrade in memory for my 2008 iMac.
It has 2.8 GHz duo core intel... Any thoughts on whether adding memory will help speed up my sometimes slow Mac?
 

Raz0rEdge

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Memory is only one part of speeding things up. But, before we gt to that conclusion..

How much memory do you currently have? Have you run Activity Monitor to see your memory usage paying close attention to the Page Outs? What applications do you routinely run? How often do you reboot/poweroff the machine? Have you used an application like OnyX to do some cleaning of caches and other routine maintenance? Have you run Disk Utility to repair disk permissions?
 
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Thanks for the quick reply.
I currently have 2GB of memory.
I have not tried activity monitor... Have used onyx.
I have removed most of my pics and videos.
Reboot only once in awhile... Have not run disk utility.

Any info on how to use activity monitor would be appreciated.
Under system memory it shows 1.97 GB is used.

Page outs 269mb
 

Raz0rEdge

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With Activity Monitor, like you have, go to System Memory and take note of Used, Wired, Inactive and Free memory numbers. The Page Outs indicate the times when there was no memory available for an application and some part of memory was written to disk to make space for it. This is an expensive process and if you see a lot of Page Outs that indicates that you are running memory hungry applications that are affecting your system performance.

Increasing memory will greatly help in these particular situations. RAM is fairly cheap so you should determine the maximum your iMac supports and go to that even if you don't think you'll ever use it..if money is tight, then look at upgrading to 8GB at least..
 
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What is a lot of page outs... Mine is 299mb right now.

Spell check... Didn't mean image... How do I make sense out of the numbers for active, used etc.
Is 299 page outs a lot?
 

Raz0rEdge

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A lot is number in the GB's..on my iMac with 16GB, I have 0 Page Outs..I reboot the machine once in 6 months or less and have all sorts of stuff running all the time..that is the "ideal" situation..

The greater the page outs (and usually corresponding page ins later on) the slower the computer is going to feel during certain tasks..once it's get to a point where you're constantly paging in and out, the slowness will just persist as opposed to coming in spurts until you close applications or restart the machine..
 

Raz0rEdge

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How do image sense out of the used... Free... Wired.... Active numbers?

Screen shot you mean? Hit CMD+shift+4 and then use your mouse to select the area you want to capture. The file will be saved on your desktop and you can attach it here..

BTW, you can edit your post with additional questions/comment as opposed to creating new posts..:)
 
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Spell check error.
Didn't mean image... Asking info on how to make sense of the numbers
For active... Wired... Used, etc

Right now most of my 2GB of memory are used... Page outs up to 390mb.

Apparently I don't know how to reply without making new post, sorry.
 

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