I'm able to install the bottom stick of memory, but the top slot is a pain in the neck. I have the right type of RAM, but it won't slide into the slot at all!
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Can't install RAM!
- Thread starter Cam493
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GGJstudios
macrumors Westmere
I've tried at an angle and I've tried pressing it in and pushing, to no avail. The bottom stick went in fine, but the top slot isn't cooperating.
Macman45
macrumors G5
It takes a lot more effort than you might think...I hard this when upgrading my iMac to 16GB....Kernel panics etc. until I just applied a lot more pressure.
Just make sure they are aligned correctly and use a little more force until you hear the "click"
I finally got it in....to my surprise, I'm not seeing any change in terms of speed or performance. 🙁
simsaladimbamba
Guest
What did you expect? And from what amount of RAM to what amount of RAM did you upgrade to?
Macman45
macrumors G5
It all depends on what you are doing....It's seldom a huge instant kick in the pants effect....More evident when multitasking, video work etc.
Glad you got it in!
MonkeyBrainz
macrumors regular
Keep trying... that is... if it's the same exact RAM as the first. Sometimes RAM needs quite a bit of force in order to slide in. Make sure any metal holds are pushed to the side out of the way. But use common sense force, not Herculean force. The first time I ever replaced RAM, I felt like I was disarming a nuke. Was very nervous. 😛
EDIT: Looks like you figured it out.
Some things I thought should be faster weren't, but I could tell overall it made a massive difference.
Maybe you have a hardware problem 🙁
More RAM allows you to have more data in that active memory space. The only cases where you'll see a noticeable speed increase are ...
1. You're frequently out of available RAM. This means you're running memory-hungry apps like Photoshop on a regular basis. When you try to switch to another app, it'll need to free that memory then pull the app into RAM. More RAM helps directly in this situation.
2. The memory you added is a faster speed than the old RAM. This is far less noticeable overall, since the bottleneck will tend to be the Hard Drive, but if you replace 1033MHz RAM with a faster variety (and the Mac supports it), you may see some benefit.
In no other case will you really see any performance benefit from adding more RAM. If you really want to test it, see how many programs you can open before you start seeing it be sluggish (indicating RAM being swapped back out to the Hard Disk to make room).
This is where I saw it - I could have mail, safari, word, firefox (school), scrivener, and other stuff open and keep on working. I had tried doing some stuff in iPhoto & Aperture with all that going and it was croaking!