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A few newbie questions..

T

temiller

macrumors member
Original poster
First post, new to the forums by the way.

I recently broke down and bought a 13" MBP last week (and its been an incredibly long wait for it to come in on the first). I use to hate mac with a passion.. A real passion. I had to use one for my last Internship (Marketing and Promotions for my colleges Basketball team), and it slowly but surely grew on me. One of my buddies got one, and I would use it whenever my laptop was in its little hole trying to kill itself. I secretly was in love but wouldn't admit it, Then I gave up my blackberry and got the iPhone 4. Fast forward to last week, I saw an extra 1600 in my bank account, So I bought my MBP and got the free iPod.

Now, I wanted to upgrade to the 8 gigs of ram (Although i'm unsure if I'll ever need 8 gigs), but the price tag from apple was just out of the question. I found I can pick up 8 gigs for under $200. I saw that third party ram won't void your applecare, but will doing it myself void my applecare? I've searched and I really haven't been able to come up with an answer.

And I was looking at cases, found a hard one on ebay, ordered it, and its just this flimsy plastic that looks like it will break as soon as I install it. Is there any other quality cases out there besides the incase ones that seem to pop up everywhere?
 
installing your own ram most certainly should not void your apple care, buying replacing your own logic board could though >_< you can always shoot apple care and email and ask, as far as the case i frown upon them, you have a beautiful aluminum exterior that will last for several years as long as you don't use it for Frisbee.

oo and welcome to the family
 
Installing RAM and a new HDD are the two things that don't void Applecare.

When it comes to a case, I don't really see the point. Most other laptops are plastic and I rarely ever see cases on them, but I constantly see cases on an aluminum Macbook Pro, go figure.
 
Thanks guys, I'll shoot them an email when it comes time for me upgrade (if ever needed).

As for the case, I would prefer to not use one, but the whole college lifestyle (which I may have perfected in the last 5 years I might add) destroys the outershell of laptops in no time. This way I'll be able to take it off once in a while and admire its beauty without seeing scuffs and marks all over it lol.
 
temiller said:
Thanks guys, I'll shoot them an email when it comes time for me upgrade (if ever needed).

As for the case, I would prefer to not use one, but the whole college lifestyle (which I may have perfected in the last 5 years I might add) destroys the outershell of laptops in no time. This way I'll be able to take it off once in a while and admire its beauty without seeing scuffs and marks all over it lol.
Click to expand...

two years of collage life so far hasn't left a mark on mine 😉 be careful
 
temiller said:
First post, new to the forums by the way.

I recently broke down and bought a 13" MBP last week (and its been an incredibly long wait for it to come in on the first). I use to hate mac with a passion.. A real passion. I had to use one for my last Internship (Marketing and Promotions for my colleges Basketball team), and it slowly but surely grew on me. One of my buddies got one, and I would use it whenever my laptop was in its little hole trying to kill itself. I secretly was in love but wouldn't admit it, Then I gave up my blackberry and got the iPhone 4. Fast forward to last week, I saw an extra 1600 in my bank account, So I bought my MBP and got the free iPod.

Now, I wanted to upgrade to the 8 gigs of ram (Although i'm unsure if I'll ever need 8 gigs), but the price tag from apple was just out of the question. I found I can pick up 8 gigs for under $200. I saw that third party ram won't void your applecare, but will doing it myself void my applecare? I've searched and I really haven't been able to come up with an answer.

And I was looking at cases, found a hard one on ebay, ordered it, and its just this flimsy plastic that looks like it will break as soon as I install it. Is there any other quality cases out there besides the incase ones that seem to pop up everywhere?
Click to expand...
Read your user manual. It says installing RAM does not void the warranty. It also has a page describing how to do it. Just be careful, you will need a good #00 Philips head screwdriver and take care, the screws are small, very small. Put them back in the same location too. Be sure to get the RA chips seated correctly and you should be OK. There are tons of threads on this subject. Even on this page! Try using MRoogle for these kind of searches, it works really well.
😎:apple:😎
 
I think I read over that part. I saw in the manual where it showed you how to change your ram, but I understood it as any changes need to be done by someone lisenced. Sadly my MBP won't be at my house untill 10:30 am and I already read the manual. I'm like an 8 year old on Christmas eve right now.

What's worse is that I have a check list of everything I need to do to it and a few discs all ready go go.
 
temiller said:
I think I read over that part. I saw in the manual where it showed you how to change your ram, but I understood it as any changes need to be done by someone lisenced. Sadly my MBP won't be at my house untill 10:30 am and I already read the manual. I'm like an 8 year old on Christmas eve right now.

What's worse is that I have a check list of everything I need to do to it and a few discs all ready go go.
Click to expand...

What are you uses with this computer. 99.9% of people don't need 8 gb of ram. You would have to be doing some serious rendering or whatnot to even approach that. I would rcommend an ssd upgrade. This is an upgrade that actually gives you a noticeable difference in day to day use.
 
8gb is overkill, save your money and get a SSD or nice HDD. I'm a heavy user and judging by System Monitor I've only paged out ~400mb in the past 10 days - completely acceptable to me.
 
I got 8Gb on my iMac, and after a few hours use I'm often at 4-5Gb used memory, maybe 6 at most. But I do pass the 4Gb barrier pretty easilly with just having 8-10 applications going and a few firefox tabs and such. When I upgrade my MBP I'll get 8Gb too, it's not "way too much".

That being said, I got 4Gb in my laptop (13" mbp) now and it works great too, I haven't had any problems with that. The biggest performance change you can do on an MBP is a SSD drive, it will make a huge difference. While 8Gb can be needed sometimes, I agree with RedReplicant that an SSD is worth considering.
 
RedReplicant said:
8gb is overkill
Click to expand...

nope I have 0kb swap over the last 23 days.

there is no point in an SSD if you don't turn off your mac. people like me with 8GB ram that never turn off our macs see incredibly fast loads after the first time we open an application. Reason is its now stored in the ram, from where it wont be removed because we have as much as we do. and just to show how much faster it is I get 1.2GB/s read write to my ram. so unless there is an SSD that can beat that, go with the extra RAM, and just don't turn off your mac.
 
On memory: 4 GB RAM should be plenty for all sorts of work. Remember that half of this is the standard amount on the MacBook and the Mac Mini, and they do just fine. Also, doubling the RAM also nearly doubles the power needed to run the memory; therefore, more RAM means more heat on your lap and less run time on a battery charge.

That being said, there can be some cases when the extra RAM is useful. The main benefit for a notebook user here is less paging of virtual memory which means less disk wear and potentially less power consumption. Yet this same benefit can be had by closing applications when they're not in use.

As for case scuffs and dents, consider them a badge of honor. They show that you actually use your notebook and that you didn't buy it just for it to be eye candy.
 
Thermonuclear said:
On memory: 4 GB RAM should be plenty for all sorts of work. Remember that half of this is the standard amount on the MacBook and the Mac Mini, and they do just fine. Also, doubling the RAM also nearly doubles the power needed to run the memory; therefore, more RAM means more heat on your lap and less run time on a battery charge.
Click to expand...

I still get 8-9 hour out of my 17"

Thermonuclear said:
That being said, there can be some cases when the extra RAM is useful. The main benefit for a notebook user here is less paging of virtual memory which means less disk wear and potentially less power consumption. Yet this same benefit can be had by closing applications when they're not in use.
Click to expand...

just to clarify, page outs (swap) means spinning beach balls en-masse
 
Attempting to get it to page out failed...
stressin.jpg



Firefox with 17 tabs, LR loading my 2.8k image gallery, PS, etc. 8gb is great for extreme 13" users or iMac/15"+ MBP... but for the average 13" user and most of the power 13" users? A little overboard.
 
mulo said:
play a HD movie from an external HDD with 64bit VLC, its bugged, doesn't drop its memory until you unmount the drive.

i'm currently using 1.55GB just for Safari.
Click to expand...

Hm, that's an interesting bug. I wonder if the same happens for a networked drive... I do notice that if you switch movies really quick in most video players it will still keep pulling the old videos across the network until you close the program and reopen it.
 
RedReplicant said:
Hm, that's an interesting bug. I wonder if the same happens for a networked drive... I do notice that if you switch movies really quick in most video players it will still keep pulling the old videos across the network until you close the program and reopen it.
Click to expand...

it happens for me wether i'm using my drive plugged in or plugged in to my AEBS

it is freaggin annoying, was paging out 8GB couse of that once.
aperture 3 used to have an even worse bug, it had a memory leak and would simply never stop loading the library. left me with a 14GB page out once... thats when i pulled the plug, so to speak.
 
you could also search your history in safari and have it load all the previews from cache, that just ate 5GB ram on my machine 😛

gotta love "Purge"
 
I'm still not sure if I'll upgrade.. I want to get a feel with 4 gigs and see if I ever come to a point where I might need to upgrade. My desktop only has 2 gigs and I wish the mobo would allow for more, but oh well.

The most that the MBP will see probably see will be multiple words open (when doing business plans/marketing plans for school I'll have 5 - 10 open at any time while formatting and condensing, which most of the time I'll be doing on my desktop since it has dual 21" monitors.), itunes, and a few webpages open.

I would love to get a SSD, except for the price tag that comes with them. That won't happen until their price substantially drops..
 
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