Is 512mb RAM sufficent?

Hey,

I'm off to uni next year and need a laptop... I've decided to go Apple.

I'll only be using the machine for email/web/word/excel.

Do you think 512mb RAM is sufficent or is it worth the $360 for 1GB?

Is the performance boost that noticable?

Thanks.

If thats all you are using you will be perfectly fine with 512

I had 512 in my powerbook up until about a month ago but I switched into more Photoshop/iDVD/iMovie which requires more memory

My 867 was fine with 512 and the new powerbooks have almost double the processor so if I was you I would go for 512

how is 256 for the 1ghz ibook.... not gonna do stuff like photoshop or video processing..

Orange said:

how is 256 for the 1ghz ibook.... not gonna do stuff like photoshop or video processing..

Click to expand...

With no photoshop etc that will work

I found 512MB to be insufficient even for daily use. I just upgraded to 768MB today, and so far so good. Things are a tad faster, and my pageouts have dropped to zero.

512 is not insufficient for daily work unless you're insane...and I would imagine that that person doesn't really use the everday daily work that the majority of the world may use (Osiris22X - I really mean nothing by this...I just don't understand you not having sufficiency with daily use of internet and what not....I used my powerbook for a week before I upgraded the ram...and found it more than enough, and I was using photoshope with 256...now photoshop was a bit sluggish..but definelty not e-mail or web browsing...maybe you just have crazy hight standards, that I just can't comprehend...though I have used some **** fast computers).....that's all.

LOL

Okay, okay. Let me be more realistic here. The fact is...I used my Powerbook for weeks with only 256 MB of RAM and it ran just dandy. I went up to 512 MB and it ran a little better. But one day I checked my virtual memory and it was still paging out like mad. So I recently upgraded to 768 MB of RAM, and now my Mac is happy.

The fact is though, the built-in 256 MB is sufficient for daily use (hence why Apple chose that amount), so obviously 512 MB is going to be enough for basic use.

256MB or even 512MB is sufficient, yes, but you're going to have to be willing to sit through a little wait time while a 2nd or 3rd or 4th application open up and load.

I'm new to powerbooks(3 days). I got 512 in mine and noticed that if you change the power settings you can speed up the cpu alot. Photoshop runs fine, but I havn't messed around w/ imovie yet. We use 512RAM in our digital photolab on the g4's and don't have a problem.