Will ram help me?

Hi all,

Im running a mac mini (g4). Its getting a bit sluggish. Just wondering if an increase in ram from 512 to 1gb will help my situation.

Thanks.

Usually, yes. Most people see a significant improvement moving from 512Mb to 1Gb RAM.

RAM helps EVERYTHING.

You can NEVER have enough RAM.

YES! Almost everyone sees a difference between 512 and 1 gig, especially if you run multiple applications. There is also a difference between 1 gig and 2 gigs, though it is not really that noticeable to the naked eye like between 512 and 1.

yes it will help greatly (don't buy ur ram from apple though)
there are a few more things u can do to free up some ram and speed things up:
- reboot regularly
- empty ur cache
- repair disk permissions
- remove files from ur desktop and other un-needed files/apps
- get rid of useless widgets
- download MainMenu and run those maintnence tasks!!

I would be a bit worried about the fact that it is "getting sluggish". This means that it used to work just fine in the 512 MB it has. So, something has changed. Bumping up to 1GB will help with the performance, as all of the above posters have said, but perhaps it would also be useful to try to find out what is slowing it down.

As regular readers of this forum will know, I have a regular sequence of steps I prescribe for Macs that are slowing down, as a first cut at finding out what is wrong. You may wish to consider them? Here they are:

First, check that your processor is running full speed. Go to Preferences, Energy Saver, Options and look at the drop box down near the bottom called Processor Performance. If it is not set to "Highest", set it to that right away. This maximizes performance, but for notebooks, it may run down the battery faster.

Next, download OnyX and run the complete set of clean up and maintenance scripts and then try again. Get OnyX at:

http://www.titanium.free.fr/pgs/english.html

Finally, you may wish to check that you have enough free space on your hard drive. Highlight the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop, CTL-click it and select Get Info from the resulting menu. Make sure you have a reasonable amount of space left. If not, a little spring cleaning may be in order.

There are two excellent apps for showing where all of your hard disk space has gone, Disk Inventory X and WhatSize. Get them at:

Disk Inventory X: http://www.derlien.com

WhatSize: http://www.id-design.com/software/whatsize

Both do a great job at letting you zero in on your largest disk space consumers, so that you can hunt down any rogue files.

Do the OnyX thing first, then restart and try out one or both of the above tools. By the way, all three are freeware!

mac57 said:

I would be a bit worried about the fact that it is "getting sluggish". This means that it used to work just fine in the 512 MB it has. So, something has changed. Bumping up to 1GB will help with the performance, as all of the above posters have said, but perhaps it would also be useful to try to find out what is slowing it down.

Click to expand...

Exactly. It is always nice to have more RAM, but if you didn't need it before and everything was fine, adding more probably won't help your situation now.

If your machine is truly getting slower and more sluggish, then something else is afoot. The tools suggested by mac57 would be a better place to start. Clearing out caches and such will definitely speed things up.
You will also find some good tips here:

Optimizing OS X Performance: from EveryMac.com

mac57 said:

First, check that your processor is running full speed. Go to Preferences, Energy Saver, Options and look at the drop box down near the bottom called Processor Performance. If it is not set to "Highest", set it to that right away. This maximizes performance, but for notebooks, it may run down the battery faster.

Click to expand...

My MacBook doesn't even have a Processor Performance drop box. But my Mac is brand new, so I'm not worried about it just yet.

I didn't know Intel macs had the drop box..