Best amount of memory for OSX?

[smartroad]

Hay all,

I have a MacBook that only has 512MB memory and am going to upgrade, but do people recommend 1 or 2gb? Given my current financial situation I would prefer the 1gb as it is cheaper, but would I really notice much of a difference going the full 2gb?

Cheers!

 

[Noxian]

The more important question is what do you do with your computer?

 

[smartroad]

The more important question is what do you do with your computer?

Ahh sorry

Mainly it is for web surfing and mail, with some word processing thrown in. But recently I have started making a newsletter for my car club website and am using Pages, which is a dog at the moment. Also I have this tendency to like to have everything running, iTunes, Firefox, Mail to name a few. So when I start using Pages I end up having to close everything to get it to be even slight responsive.

 

[James]

You will notice a difference between 512 and 1 gig, especially if you normally have more than one app going at the same time.

The difference between 1 gig and two is not all that noticable, though there will be one, again especially if you run multiple apps, it just won't be as "Noticable" as the jump from 512 to 1 gig.

OS X, like any operating system be it os x, windows, linux, etc, likes its ram and will operate better with more ram. 512 is fairly bottom line for any operating system today. Most people get along fine with 1 gig of ram, but if your into heavy graphics and that type of thing you will probably find that 2 gig is a bit better.

With 2 gig you can probably have every app you have going without slow downs.

 

[smartroad]

Thanks James Think I will just go for 1gb for the moment. I can live with Pages if it is just a little quicker!

 

[aintor]

as many as possible~

 

[giulio]

To me it looks like 150MB are used just by booting the OS. You'll want 1GB to avoid any beach balls. 2GB if you're using it for any kind of serious work (photoshop, programming, etc).

 

[dekan]

I just checked the activity monitor. All apps I am using right now is Proteus, Safari, Mail and Finder is there anyway. Activity monitor says that there is a bit more than 800mb free RAM right now and I have a total of 2GB in my MBP. That tells me that even for a few apps 1GB isn't a whole lot and I would go for 2GB if possible...

 

[symondavis]

I have 2gb in a 2Ghz MB, I do all kinds of things like programming, movie/picture editing for sites as well as listening to itunes all the time.

I stepped in stages of 512 then 1024 then 2048. Because of what I do I noticed a big difference from 512 to 1024, there wasnt so much difference from 1024 to 2048 though but I did it anyway as some of the progamming I do is on Vista. So I at the time thought it would be best to max out my MB.
And I'm glad I did cause Vista is a memory hog when running with SDK's