1GB RAM worth my money??

[gangst]

Hi,

I know this question has been asked loads, but none of the threads were specific to my perssonal needs.
I have a 1.33ghz Powerbook and I was considering upgrading the RAM from 768mb to 1.25gb, is this 1gb RAM stick worth my money, as with Tiger will I notice goo speed improvements, also will there be any decent gains in rendering, plaayback in apps like Final Cut, DVD Studio, Motion, After Effects e.t.c. Any of you guys done this upgrade or got 1.25gb? WHtas the performance like??


Thanks

 

[Mr. Anderson]

you might see some performance increase, but i just upgraded my older dual G4 dual 1.25 from 512 meg to 2 gig and photoshop is so much better. The other apps you're talking about still require a lot of reading and writing to disk, so on the more top heavy effects, you might see more of a difference only if its currently slower than your write speed.

D

 

[macbaseball]

Yes. I love having extra RAM, and at times I could use more.

 

[grapes911]

Check your activity monitor. Are you using all or most of your RAM? If so, it will be worth it. If you are using less than 550 MB under normal use, it probably won't make a difference.

 

[Steven1621]

I would definitely upgrade. OS X has been able to use whatever about amount of RAM it can, at least in my expirences. The more the better!

 

[StarbucksSam]

Ehhhh... that's a TOUGH one. It REALLY depends on what you're doing. Those RAM sticks that are 1GB are INSANELY expensive... but they MIGHT be worth it depending on the purposes you want to use it for. If you do a lot of video/graphic editing, I'd go for it if I could afford it.

 

[Jovian9]

I upgraded my iMac G5 from 512MB to 1.5GB and it made tons of difference. The iMac rarely seems bothered with the workload now.

 

[mad jew]

I suppose it also kind of depends on how long you'll be keeping the machine for. A RAM stick like that is a pretty big investment so you don't wanna buy it now, upgrade to a new PowerBook six months down the track, and find out you can't transfer the RAM across because it's different.

 

[frenetic]

My experience is that it does make a difference, I went on exactly the same powerbook from 768 mb to 1.5 gb, and I noticed the following:
- in non cpu intensive tasks - your everyday word processing, emailing, surfing and listening to iTunes it does not make a lot difference. A bit, but not a lot.
- it does make a difference though in cpu hungry apps. For example, before I upgraded a certain song in Garagaband used full cpu power, after the upgrade it only used 50%. Technically I don't understand why this is so, but the difference was definitely there, on the same song.
- I also notice that I have longer uptimes. Before the upgrade I would restart every week or so because of some small system quirk or system slow down, now I only do so because there is a system upgrade or a security update. The system remains zippy, even after two weeks of uptime.

In short: will it be a huge improvement in the quality of your life? No - but then again if that depends on a 1 gb stick you have a serious problem. But I would definitely buy it again.

 

[ljacky]

I have the 1.33 12' powerbook. I upgraded from 512MB to 1.25GB and have notice a big difference in loading times for some applications. Virtual PC 6 running Win 2000 loads a saved computer about 4x as fast as before. I was told by an apple store employee that 768MB would be the minimum to run tiger really well and since I had to upgrade to get there I decided go for the gig and I am really happy with it I don't feel like I ever need to close any programs.

Cheers,
Luca

 

[dav]

Bought a gig stick of ram for $139... I am not complaining

 

[Demon Hunter]

RAM is always worth it! That is, if you can afford it. Really, increasing your memory will always entail a benefit; the real question is, are you prompted to upgrade because of sluggishness or because your hardware is too slow? If the former, yeah, go for it.