I will be purchasing a mac very soon and have still not decided on what to get. I am looking at powerbooks ibooks and the $799 refurbished macbooks. I am a student and cant spend over $800 really the macbook looks good but I have read alot that with 512mb is is just slow is this true?
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512mb macbook worth while
- Thread starter acoustics940
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My Macbook is the entry level Macbook with 512. I have no problems. For what I want to do with my computer, it's good enough.
I'm on an iBook G4 and I usually have Firefox open with 5-20 tabs, Adium, Thunderbird, and iTunes and 512MB handles well, except for the occasional beach ball.Contrary to popular belief, its not that bad.
Depends on what you're gonna use it for. For light work on Office / Itunes it's fine. But if you're gonna push it with CS2 apps or heavy duty video you WILL need the extra ram.
But dont forget, ram is user upgradeable. You can pick up some sticks cheap from macsales and upgrade later when you can afford to.
-mrploddy
But dont forget, ram is user upgradeable. You can pick up some sticks cheap from macsales and upgrade later when you can afford to.
-mrploddy
Hehe, net true. Office in not universal yet, so it will eat up RAM as crazy. Hell, even just opening GarageBand on a 512MB MacBook results in no free RAM.
Get that MacBook and upgrade RAM later. 1GB is minimum for comfortable work in light applications on Intel-Mac
If you are on a budget 512 should be sufficient. But once you get the money I would upgrade the ram. 512 isn't that bad but it does become quite limiting if you like to have a decent amount of programs open at any given time.
Contrary to popular belief, its not that bad.
I have 512MB of RAM on my iMac, it's not too bad, just Word running under Rosetta takes ages to start up and sometimes to respond.
PowerPC (G4/G5) performance with 512 Mb RAM is not comparable in any meaningful way with the Intel Mac performance with 512. No Rosetta...
I just bought a refurb 1.83 Core Duo MacBook for my mum. I had considered buying more memory but decided to see how it runs with 512MB. Turns out to be perfectly acceptable. At first it was pretty horrid but this was while it was downloading updates and spotlight was indexing. Once that was done the performance was pretty good so I wouldn't worry too much. Seems pretty similar to the performance of my first gen MacBook Pro with 2GB of RAM.
I agree that it really is not all that bad. I was able to use 512 RAM for quite a while without it feeling very slow. Even when I upgraded to the gig, it didn't feel much faster. It was hardly noticeable to me actually.
