White Macbook Fall 2007 Santa Rosa Recognizing 8GB of RAM

Thought to let everyone know that I just added two 4GB SODIMMS from Crucial (Crucial part number for 8GB kit CT2KIT51264AC667) to my Fall 2007 white Macbook Santa Rosa CoreDuo2 2.2GHz laptop running 10.6.8 Snow Leopard, and the system apparently recognizes ALL 8GB of RAM -- so far, everything seems normal -- boot time, opening and closing apps, multiple Safari and Firefox tabs, command-tab switching between apps -- I only expected the motherboard to recognize 6GB of the total available 8GB -- have not yet tried loading it down with many open apps, etc. to see if it will use RAM above 6GB before paging out to hard disk, or worse -- crash.

Hard disk is a Seagate 750GB 7200 RPM internal drive.

Have been running (2) Crucial 2GB SODIMMS (Crucial part number CT1004157) since springtime 2008 (total of 4GB recognized and used) with zero trouble -- most crash free and reliable machine I have ever used.

Assuming that this Macbook is not only reporting 8GB of RAM, but actually uses all 8GB of RAM without crashing or paging out to hard disk, then this old Macbook laptop is STILL very usable -- despite being stuck on 10.6.8 Snow Leopard -- by today's standards, per se. I cannot think of anything that this laptop cannot do -- maybe not quite as fast at rendering video or ripping a CD -- but not painfully slow by any measure.

I have carried this laptop around the world several times, as part of my professional toolset, and it has never failed to operate as needed -- keep thinking that it is time to spring for a new Mac laptop, but then I remember that I will ALSO need to upgrade my Adobe Creative Suite from version 3 to latest version -- my older version 3 works perfectly, but requires Rosetta, which only works on older Macs and OSX versions.

Nahhhh -- just keep on using the old Macbook hardware, since it works so reliably and predictably -- though I am sure that Apple would LIKE to sell me new hardware to replace my nearly six year old Macbook.

Will comment back in a week or three, once I have had the opportunity to drive this new RAM configuration around the block at excessively high speeds.

Niffy

Thanks for the heads-up -- was wondering about stability above 6GB -- will report back, once I have pushed the RAM edges a few times.

Worse comes to worse, just need to reinstall one of my 2GB SODIMMs back into the Macbook, bringing the total installed RAM to 6GB -- though, the RAM SODIMMS will not be a matched pair -- maybe take a bit of a performance hit -- or not.


Niffy

Promised follow-up.

Recap -- tried to run two 4GB 667 MHz SODIMMS, which proved to be unstable after a couple of hours of use -- Finder would become wonky, nothing really crashed hard, per se.

Replaced one of the two 4GB 667 MHz SODIMMS with a 2GB 667 MHz SODIMM, and have been running this configuration for over a month. Performance degradation, if there was any due to mismatched SODIMM sizes, is not noticeable. Stability is perfect, with no sign of any instabilities or cosmic weirdness, even when pushed hard to the RAM limits, forcing extensive hard drive paging as the OSX shuffles the memory usage between RAM and hard drive.

Bottom line -- the Santa Rosa Core Duo 2 CPU in the Fall 2007 Macbook will correctly and reliably support 6GB of REAL SODIMM RAM, regardless of what the memory vendors or Apple says regarding this manner.

New topic, but related to upping the performance of this Macbook -- came across a deal on a Seagate 750GB 7200 RPM SSHD hybrid internal laptop hard drive http://www.seagate.com/internal-hard-drives/laptop-hard-drives/laptop-solid-state-hybrid-drive/, and decided to install into the Macbook.

Am impressed with its overall performance, as it adds an additional level of snappiness to this older hardware. Have been running it about a month, and seems stable and capable. Apps open quickly, and boot times are noticeably reduced. Replaced an existing internal Seagate 750GB 7200 RPM non-hybrid drive, so am comparing these two different but similar Seagate internal laptop hard drives. The hybrid drive appears to run quite a bit cooler, if my temperature monitors are to be believed.

For the money invested -- ~$100.00 for RAM, $115.00 for the Seagate hybrid hard drive, plus time to install, appears to be a worthy upgrade for the road warrior and average user, alike. Likely have gained an additional 2+ years of use of this laptop before finally needing to upgrade to newer Mac laptop hardware.

Running OSX 10.6.8 Snow Leopard -- solid.

Niffy