Do I need more RAM?

Right now I have Safari under 2 tabs running, iChat and Yahoo messenger running. Also Finder and Dashboard, but those are always running.

I currently have about 7 MB free and 110 inactive. I was told free and inactive could be free memory pretty much. I have 512 MB. At the most, I would probably have 5-7 programs running. Should I get more RAM or should I stick with 512 MB?

well, with what you're doing, it's a toss up. I would only think about it if you were experiencing any slow downs when accessing a couple of those programs at once. you're not doing anything really memory intensive. though safari will use more and more as it's open, so an occasional restart of safari is a nice remedy for that.

at this point, if you're satisfied, i'd say no. but 1 Gb would certainly make your mb quite a bit snappier than 512Mb.

Personally, I wouldn't even think about running with less than 1gig. If you're not frustrated with performance, then it's probably not worth the bother, but adding another stick of 512mb is cheap and easy to do yourself, so there's not much reason not to. I'd bet you'd notice a bump in performance...

Go for 2GB RAM. When you have multi applications open at the same time, it eats up RAM space.

eric said:

at this point, if you're satisfied, i'd say no.

Click to expand...

djames42 said:

If you're not frustrated with performance, then it's probably not worth the bother.

Click to expand...

I am going to third this opinion. More RAM won't hurt your machine, but if you are fine with what you have then there isn't much point in adding more.

As soon as I upgraded a Mac Mini from 512MB to 1GB it flew. If you have integrated graphics you need 1GB, the integrated graphics eat up some of the 512MB.

djames42 said:

Personally, I wouldn't even think about running with less than 1gig. If you're not frustrated with performance, then it's probably not worth the bother, but adding another stick of 512mb is cheap and easy to do yourself, so there's not much reason not to. I'd bet you'd notice a bump in performance...

Click to expand...

On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the hardest, what would you rate installing more RAM on a MB?

I'm pretty much a noob

cxjr25 said:

On a scale of 1-10, 10 being the hardest, what would you rate installing more RAM on a MB?

I'm pretty much a noob

Click to expand...

If you can turn a screw driver and open a beer when you are done I would say a 1 if 1= easy and 10= hard.

RAM is getting cheaper and cheaper all of the time for these laptops; I would highly recommend just maxing it out at 2GB. I upgraded my MBP from 1 to 2GB and it helped a lot for games and multi-tasking. You can get good deals on newegg.com for RAM like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820146683

To put it in perspective, one Mushkin 1GB stick was $115 when I bought it last december, and now a matched pair is $80 so I definitely would do it if you can afford to. I'm not saying that 2GB is essential, but for the price why not? Otherwise, 1GB sounds like it would suit your tasks just fine, and if you carefully monitor your usage, 512mb just might be fine for you. Sometimes if I have a lot of inactive memory I free it up by running a permissions verify in Disk Utility, and slimming down startup items helps too; I only have SMC Fan Control open on start up. Once again though, when it comes to RAM, the more the merrier. It also is a good exercise in future readiness for the OS releases yet to come as the requirements are only going to grow. Anyway, good luck and make the choice that's right for you!

get 2gb it's more than twice faster than with 512mb

For what it's worth, I've got 2g in my MBP, but then I run Parallels quite frequently (for work stuff). If I wasn't needing to run Windows applications side-by-side, I could probably get away with 1g most of the time.

As I said, if you're not frustrated with performance, don't bother. However, if you do upgrade your machine to at least 1g, you'll probably ask yourself why you didn't do it earlier. You'll definitely see a speed bump from the extra memory.

Remember too, Apple doesn't even sell these machines with less than 1g anymore (the Mini being the exception).