RAM question about early 2009 Macbook(13 Inch)

[therookielot]

Hi, I'm just wondering if it's worth the trouble to upgrade the RAM on my Macbook?

Right now I'm running El Captain on 4 GB. A lot of the system applications aren't running as smooth as they used to. I see the spinning cursor a lot and playing a track or MIDI instrument in GarageBand starts to sound fuzzy and lags a little bit after a few minutes.

I haven't even opened the Photos application because it takes forever to scroll so I just mostly sync to Amazon photos or the Cloud.

Just wondering if it's worth it to go up to 6gb, or what will work? Can anyone provide me with links to some products that will help me.

Thanks!

 

[harryb2448]

Alas at seven years old it is showing its age. Regarding memory you will have to decide if it is worth the effort as the max you can run is 6GB, 1 x 4GB and 1 x 2GB. In your position I would put the money into an OWC SSD which will be the biggest bang for your buck. It is SATA II or 3Gb/ps so I would suggest one of these:-


http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/SSD/Mercury_Electra_3G_Solid_State

 

[iManiac]

My years of experience with adding extra ram is that if your system is extremely low on ram then yes adding would help a lot (too little ram and your system will spend a lot of time reading/writing ram to the hard drive for temporary storage). However, 4 GB of ram should be PLENTY for most average usage and so you probably would not see any noticeable speed increase in your case (but if you routinely have 10 or more apps open at once then it may help, and ram is pretty cheap these days).

An SSD would probably give you a significant relative speed boost, making the computer feel snappier. If most of the perceived slowdown is related to the video, it would still seem rather slow (many updated programs today are serious video hogs).

Personally, I have the same issues (old Macs running El Capitan and feeling mighty slow these days). The only real fix is to buy new hardware. This year will probably be a good year to update, with Apple (probably) including Thunderbolt 3 in all the machines, along with faster graphics and SSD drives as standard.