Considering upgrading to 8gb ram, questions

[dkillgo]

I recently purchased a new MBP 13" i5 and am considering upgrading the RAM to 8gb. I have done a little searching around the forum here, and people are talking about different speeds that may work on my model MPB or may not work, and I wasn't able to find a definite answer.

Can those of you who have a 2011 MBP 13' and have upgraded it to 8gb of RAM provide me with a link to what you bought and let me know how it is running for you?

Also, the reason for the upgrade is to hopefully get my windows installation in parallels working a bit faster. How big of a difference in overall performance will I notice by upgrading to 8gb of RAM?

Thanks for the help.

 

[cloroxbleach4]

This was a thread from awhile ago. But the ram is the same.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1163353/

 

[dagamer34]

Virtual machines feed on RAM. 8GB is really ideal to not have to swap data to a hard drive. And if you're running a VM from an SSD, you can boot to the Windows 7 desktop in about 5 seconds (no joke).

 

[Uffish Thought]

Parallels

I ran Parallels, Win7, IE on 4GB RAM for a bit, dedicating 1GB to the app.
It ran fine, but I really could not have any other apps open, or it became unusable.

8GB total, 2GB dedicated to Parallels, allows me to have as many other apps open as I want, i.e. Pages, iTunes, Evernote, Address book, etc.

 

[gorskiegangsta]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231342

this is the one I'm running (2011 13" i5 MBP) and it's running perfectly.

EDIT: Running Windows 7 in Parallels is precisely why I decided to upgrade, and now it works excellently. Before (with 4gb) I had to quit all the apps in OS X to be able to run the VM with just 1GB dedicated memory. Now, I can have as many apps open as I please in OS X, while having 2GB dedicated to the VM and still have memory to spare.

 

[dkillgo]

Thanks for the info.

 

[fat jez]

This is what I use:
Crucial 2x4GB

 

[42streetsdown]

it certainly can't hurt. RAM is cheap. I don't think most people need it though. Virtualization is the only task i can think of that is a normal consumer thing to do. Graphics heavy things like HD video editing need more RAM, but most consumer camcorders don't have that high of bit rates. And i don't think most people do heavy dynamic simulations. But like i said it can't hurt.