Does 500mb ram make a difference?

[Ichkamo]

Hi,
I have a Macbook pro 15inch (not unibody) model A1150, with 1,5Gb of ram.
I was wondering if making it 2Gb would bring any significant change in therm of speed?
Any advices or comments appreciated

Ps : I run mac OSX 10.5 leopard on it.

 

[Intell]

It would make it a bit faster. Have you though about upgrading to a slightly more secure OS such as Snow Leopard?

 

[DeltaMac]

There will always be some advantage with more memory installed.
Will it be a significant difference for you? Probably not in any noticeable way.

You COULD upgrade to Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.x), which will give you some space back on your hard drive. (10.6 install removes the PPC code that Leopard still has, which may give you several GB back when the install is complete.)

If you do upgrade to 10.6, then even that extra 512 MB will help, too...

 

[Ichkamo]

Yeah my favorite OSX is snow leopard (along with Mav). The thing is that this mac is already slow enough with leopard, will it be worse with snow?
Because I have a mac with both snow and mav, and since the mav upgrade (mountain to mav) it's significantly slower, I'm just affraid that the newest the osx, the more appetite it has for perfs... And I think the snow upgrade isnt free, though I'm not sure...

 

[Intell]

With a full 2GB of memory, Snow Leopard runs nicely on that machine. Better than Leopard in some cases.

 

[Ichkamo]

With a full 2GB of memory, Snow Leopard runs nicely on that machine. Better than Leopard in some cases.

Thanks, that's good to know. I'll do it then.

 

[segers909]

A cheap SSD will give you a much larger speed difference, but depending on the required capacity might be above your budget.

 

[snaky69]

Yeah my favorite OSX is snow leopard (along with Mav). The thing is that this mac is already slow enough with leopard, will it be worse with snow?
Because I have a mac with both snow and mav, and since the mav upgrade (mountain to mav) it's significantly slower, I'm just affraid that the newest the osx, the more appetite it has for perfs... And I think the snow upgrade isnt free, though I'm not sure...

Snow Leopard is actually faster than Leopard on those older machines. Snow Leopard was essentially Leopard with some under-the-hood tweaks to make it faster.

 

[JHUFrank]

2 gigs of ram + Snow Leopard makes for a pretty nice little box. I think that machine if a C2D will take 4 gigs of RAM with 3 useable.

 

[Intell]

2 gigs of ram + Snow Leopard makes for a pretty nice little box. I think that machine if a C2D will take 4 gigs of RAM with 3 useable.

The first generation Intell non-Mac Pros were firmware limited to 2GB of memory. It wasn't until the second generation Core2Duo models that they could access 3.3GB if 4GB was installed.