2 gb or 4 gb of ram

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hi im going to be purchasing a new mbp 13 inch in october...i am stuck on whether or not to get 2 gb of ram or 4gb. my main tasks will be itunes-11000 song library, watching movies, making music on garage band, and a lot of the everyday stuff internet email, etc...its only $90 more fo rthr 4 gb of ram so ya...


thanks in advance


brian
 
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Depends if you are comfortable replacing the ram yourself. Isn't too difficult from what others have posted on here.
Never hurts to have a little extra memory.

$50 online for 4gb if you do it yourself. Check out amazon, crucial, newegg, etc. etc.
 
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If you feel comfortable with doing it yourself, I'd say go for 4GB. RAM is so cheap nowadays, and you can never have too much of it.
 

CrimsonRequiem


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Upgrading the RAM is not hard. Especially when there are so many resources online that show you step by step on how to do it.

Save yourself some cash and buy the bare minimum when it comes to RAM and HDD Size/Speed.

Seen here.

You save yourself almost 40-50 bucks.

Guide on how to upgrade here. Brought to you by chrismac, from our own forums.
 
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As said, if you have the extra money, then go for the 4GB. You shouldn't need more than that. Unless you plan on running alot of applications at once.



With my iMac I only have 2GB, and I often find that it gets kind of slow when I have iTunes open (however, I only have about 400 songs), Safari, Adium and a few other medium intensity applications open. 4GB is a must, however, if you plan on doing some mid to heavy weight photo editing, since this can really do a number on performance. If, for whatever reason you feel it is necessary to upgrade your RAM to a higher level, you can replace it easily, as CR mentioned. It is probably better for an Apple genius to do it for you though, if you feel you are not experienced enough to do so yourself.
 
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For the money 4GB is a worth while upgrade.

Edit - But dont buy from Apple. Get it from somewhere like Crucial. Like Crimson states follow my guide and you will be fine. [in my sig]
 

cwa107


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I would question whether or not you actually need 4GB. If you're running Windows in a virtual machine, or heavy hitter apps like Final Cut, Photoshop, etc., then 4GB might be worthwhile. But for more basic applications 2GB should be suitable. And of course, should you find that it's not enough, you can always pick up some more memory for far less than what Apple charges and install it yourself.

Do not assume that more memory always means a faster computer, this is a common misconception.
 
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While I agree that simply adding ram will not always yield faster processing... for the cost of it now, I see no reason not to toss 4gb in. But that's me, and I use vm's, photoshop, render in sketchup etc. So my point of view is biased towards more hp, period.
 
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I found that I need the 4gb. I went from a Macbook with 3gb (max for that one) to a 13" MBP with two, and noted that when I have all my safari tabs, iTunes, Mail, and Photoshop, it was...okay, the 3gb did make a difference. However I also run a VM. On the 3gb MB it was adequate and got good response but on this machine bringing up the VM put it over the edge on the swap deparment. I just upgraded to 4GB and now I am back to the old performance.

That's kind of a special case thing though.
 

CrimsonRequiem


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At my school we still are using eMacs with 1GB of RAM running the CS3 suite. Our visual arts department is seriously under funded. T_T"

They run perfectly fine it just takes 5 minutes to do special filter. >_<"
 
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i upgraded thru apple when i got my macbookpro to 4GB ram. and it still 'lags' from time to time. so i think 2GB is definitely not enough.
 

CrimsonRequiem


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i upgraded thru apple when i got my macbookpro to 4GB ram. and it still 'lags' from time to time. so i think 2GB is definitely not enough.

What applications do you have open that makes your MBP lag? I have 40+ Tabs open in firefox, itunes, and Illustrator, Photoshop, and inDesign open with no lag.
 
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actually. nothing much. but when loading gifs and stuff on safari or just random surfing, the beach ball comes out sometimes. might be due to mine being 5400rpm or smth. hope to upgrade to a 7200rpm HD soon.
 
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Way... way too many specs to list.
yea, that's caching.
 
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Am I the only one doing fine on one gig of RAM? For me anyway, running just Leopard takes up like only 400MB of RAM, and I often run a lot of applications at once, VMs included. As of this very moment, I am running two web browsers with five tabs open, running iTunes and playing songs (I read that in previous posts people telling how many songs they have - I don't think this is relevant to memory, but just in case it is, I have 3400), also running MSN, and Transmission is transferring data with seven torrents. That, currently takes up 750MB. Only when I run a virtual OS where I'd give it just under 500MB of memory, does my computer slow down a little, but not far enough that I feel an extra gig or two of RAM is necessary. Granted though, I am upgrading my machine to 2GB next week. I suspect that then running my virtual OS's that my machine would run as smoothly as it does now without running a virtual OS.
 
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With the price of RAM these days, I'm not sure there is any real reason NOT get upgrade to 4GB at some point.
 
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You're just a very patient person, that's all.

Hmm I don't know, I still find my MacBook to be really fast, especially now that I have my 7200RPM drive. But anyway, I'm gonna order my two gigs of RAM soon so I'll see what kind of difference that makes.
 

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