4gb upgrade

Hi all, I bought my first mac book pro about 3 months ago, got the biggest and the best except for the 4gb of ram, mine only had 2. Got the 7200 hard drive and the high-res screen.

I will have to admit that I was pretty disappointed in the machine, I would get the little spinning circle a lot of times while doing not to labor intensive tasks (safari, mail, office, calendar, and itunes running and switching between them) I really expected it to have no problems with this type of work, especially for the $3500 I spent on the mac.

3 days ago I upgraded to 4gb of ram and wow there is a huge difference, seem to be running so much better, no hangs ups in Safari and no non-responding programs. I was really considering selling the mac but now am happy with the performance.

So if anyone is frustrated with their performance upgrade your ram and you should be good.

Todd_K said:

Hi all, I bought my first mac book pro about 3 months ago, got the biggest and the best except for the 4gb of ram, mine only had 2. Got the 7200 hard drive and the high-res screen.

I will have to admit that I was pretty disappointed in the machine, I would get the little spinning circle a lot of times while doing not to labor intensive tasks (safari, mail, office, calendar, and itunes running and switching between them) I really expected it to have no problems with this type of work, especially for the $3500 I spent on the mac.

3 days ago I upgraded to 4gb of ram and wow there is a huge difference, seem to be running so much better, no hangs ups in Safari and no non-responding programs. I was really considering selling the mac but now am happy with the performance.

So if anyone is frustrated with their performance upgrade your ram and you should be good.

Click to expand...

Yep agree. Where is cheapest to buy in UK?

How is the memory configured in a Macbook Pro at the moment? If I did want to upgrade to 4GB, what memory would I have to buy basically?

(Mine is a 1 month old 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo 15.4")

Am wondering if anyone has put 4GB in the previous generation MBP that says it only supports 3GB.

With what result? Would this maintain dual channel mode?

BTW: All current Mac's except the MacPro use 200 pin SO-DIMM at 667 Mhz

pc2-5300

bobtomay: As far as I know the last generation machines won't do 4GB. It's a chipset limitation, not an Apple-imposed limitation. What kind of intelligent life drove the decision to make a chipset support 3GB across 2 slots (meaning that it has to access a 2GB DIMM anyhow) instead of 4, I'm not sure. But I've seen a bunch of PCs based on the i945m (both laptop and itx desktop/industrial boards), and they all max at 3GB.

And yes, 4GB makes this thing a LOT faster.

Geeky, yeah, just wondering, since from my reading, it seems that the 2GB stick can go into either slot, if you put a 2GB into both, would it see 1.5 in each slot & still run in dual channel or would it see the 2GB in the first slot before it started looking at the 2nd slot - am tempted to try it out just to see if no one has done it. Can always resell a stick of ram.

Ok, someone stop my head from spinning.

Why would a computer run faster with 4GB of RAM if it never fully uses the 2GB that was in it previously?

My brain is failing to compute why Safari would act differently with that much RAM, since it only uses a very, very small percentage of the original 2GB.

nZa:
I don't know, I really don't. But I can tell you that the general sluggishness that OSX has always exhibited-on EVERY computer I've ever used, from G3s to G4s to a dual 2.0 G5 and my own MBP-only went away when I stuck 4GB of RAM in the MBP.

It no longer chokes when someone IMs me and the dock icon starts bouncing while I'm typing in text boxes, for example. It used to drop characters every time the icon bounced until I clicked it to stop the bouncing. My G4 does that as well. I've formatted the discs in both machines and done clean installs of 10.3 and 10.4 (on the G4) and 10.4 (on the MBP) MULTIPLE times, and it continues to happen. Putting 4GB in the MBP solved that issue.

OSX as a general rule has always felt very unresponsive and slow to me, relative to a fresh install of XP. I've seen XP crawl like OSX does, but only after it's been installed for oh, 3 or 4 weeks at least. Even with 4GB there's still a very consistent 3 second delay between clicking the signal strength icon in the menu bar and the airport menu popping up. But adding the extra 2GB took care of a lot of that lagginess, and it's now at a level where I can tolerate it. I still can't handle using the G4 for more than half an hour or 40 minutes at a time; after that it starts to irritate the heck out of me and I have to switch back to either the MBP or one of the PCs.

Geeky1 said:

I've seen XP crawl like OSX does, but only after it's been installed for oh, 3 or 4 weeks at least

Click to expand...

haahah. I understand what you're saying entirely, I just don't understand why. The dock uses (according to my Act. Mon.) 7MB, Firefox 150MB, and Adium 25MB. I have 1.6GB of RAM free, sitting there dead to the world.

I don't get it

COnfig

Just ordered a MBP 15" 2gb.
Is the memory 2GB in one slot, or 2 x 1gb sticks.
Just wondering before I buy another 2gb

Thanks!

has 2 x 1GB sticks

bobtomay said:

has 2 x 1GB sticks

Click to expand...

Thanks man, so for 4gb I would have to remove them and put 2 x 2gb sticks in right?

Could I get much on ebay for the 1 gig sticks do you think?

I've always had good luck selling memory on Ebay. I'm about to do the upgrade myself and I think I'll get about 50% of what similar chips sell for new. Why not just go on ebay and search for the same?