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How much RAM would you recommend to run leopard??

A

anti-microsoft

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Dec 15, 2006
1,665
6
Edinburgh, Scotland
I'm running a Revision A, entry model 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook with a 60GB Hard Drive (soon replaced) and 512MB of RAM.

For doing daily tasks like email, web-surfing, Word proccesing, Photo editing (nothing big just iPhoto), Listening to music,... I find my MacBook beachballing a lot, and heating up quite a bit too.

So how much RAM should I install in my MacBook?? Should I Max it out at 2GB??? Should I replace 512 for 1GB?? Would do you recommend?
 
Is there a way to tell if you need more?

For example it takes 10 seconds for iPhoto to open and about 4 seconds to close.

Today I was doing a Pages layout and the typing on the screen was slow.

Rendering a DVD menu takes over two hours.

Will more RAM help these situations?

I have a 2.16g dual core 2 intel, with currently 1 gig of ram.
 
email68 said:
Is there a way to tell if you need more?

For example it takes 10 seconds for iPhoto to open and about 4 seconds to close.

Today I was doing a Pages layout and the typing on the screen was slow.

Rendering a DVD menu takes over two hours.

Will more RAM help these situations?

I have a 2.16g dual core 2 intel, with currently 1 gig of ram.
Click to expand...

yes, it will. You have a core 2 duo so you'll be able to o with 3GB of RAM
 
d wade said:
i just ordered the 2GB upgrade for my mbp intel core duo and i can't wait!

$64 with tax shipped from crucial.com
Click to expand...

Yeah I think I'll buy RAM from crucial now, 'cos I looked at the macrumors guide about buying RAM and it says OWC is good for the US amd crucial is good internacionally.
 
I bought 4gb from newegg http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16820231135

I had a freezing problem with my 24" imac (not memory related) but I got a new machine tonite from the apple store and it only has the stock 1gb of memory with leopard and I can tell you it is pretty zippy.

I have not installed my 4gb yet.

I have been trying to crash/freeze this machine (long story) but have not been able to I've been running every program I have and installing programs at the same time, running video full screen etc.

All this to point out that leopard will run fine on 1gb of memory
 
SmurfBoxMasta said:
Shoot, I remember when I got my first G3, 256mb sticks were close to $100 each. But fortunately, about 6 months later, they starting dropping like a rock, and by the end of that year, I grabbed 3 of them for <<$50 :eek:
Click to expand...

RAM has gotten so cheap and fast these days its not even funny! I remember in the late 1990s finding PC-100 RAM was about $1.25 per meg. it would cost around $175 - $200 for 128mb ram chip :(. (And you had to buy them in pairs!!)
 
Just go for 2GB. With 1GB and running some apps on a 1.83 C2D I was getting many pageouts with the 2 I have not so far...

I do have to state that it seems weird to me that same brand Ram offers an Apple and non-apple variety with the Apple ones priced higher. I took the lower priced ones nd it works fine - I think now that everything is all intel based that everything seems to work and if it doesn't it is more likely than not bad ram...once you get it in though you can always test it with rember.
 
Well that's really a TIME based problem, rather than say, your application pool.

For instance, if you wanted to run "Spots" for like 3 days, you'll need about +2GB of RAM for the usual memory leaks. After that, it's an exponential curve that shoots up fairly high. So like 5 days would require 10GB of RAM, and 7 days is off the charts (or a big hard drive for swap).

Your mileage may vary

But wait - wait - Apple MBPros use DDR2 memory but doesn't utilize the double rate bus speeds that's been available on bus controllers for like 2 years. Huh? Nah, noone would be that stupid/greedy. Would they do that?

I just don't seriously believe that. Thinkpads even use DDR2 on the bus clocks, oh heck so do Dell's. I KNOW Apple must do it then. So that does it - all you Apple bashers are just Apple haters is all. All you Apple haters just hate Apple.

That's all - you just love Microsoft and hate Apple and are hate mongerrrerrs. You wait till I tell the teacher
 
I'm running Leopard on my Powerbook G4 1.5ghz with the measly 512 megs of RAM it came with. Leopard runs very fast with the minimum amount of required RAM. But after this discussion, I decided to order 1 gig from OWC just for the heck of it. So I'll have 1 gig in one slot, and 256 megs in the other. I'm anxious to see what kind of change that will make.
 
anti-microsoft said:
I'm running a Revision A, entry model 1.83GHz Core Duo MacBook with a 60GB Hard Drive (soon replaced) and 512MB of RAM.

For doing daily tasks like email, web-surfing, Word proccesing, Photo editing (nothing big just iPhoto), Listening to music,... I find my MacBook beachballing a lot, and heating up quite a bit too.

So how much RAM should I install in my MacBook?? Should I Max it out at 2GB??? Should I replace 512 for 1GB?? Would do you recommend?
Click to expand...

2GB at www.crucial.com/uk is £34 with free shipping. At that price, getting less than 2GB is nonsense.
 
iQuit said:
Where was I when RAM prices dropped so drastically? Last time I remember 2GB's was $150-$200?
Click to expand...

I paid £70 extra when I bought the MacBook to have 1GB instead of 512MB. Now I've paid £34 for two 1GB sticks, and the two old 512MB sticks are now useless. On the other hand, if I had planned ahead and bought one 1GB chip at that time, the additional cost would have been so much more that I wouldn't have saved anything.
 
Faulty RAM?

About 16 months ago I upgraded my G4 PB from 512 MB to 1.5 GB using Samsung RAM from Crucial. The about 8 months ago, my computer began to act very funny. Whenever you would close it, it would sleep, but would not awake after re-opening the top. Furthermore, after then trying to just restart, you would just get a black screen. Placing the PB in the freezer (I'm not kidding!) would remedy this problem though. This became very annoying after about 1 week.

Luckily, I still had my Apple Care and I brought it in. They had to replace the logic board and told me it was due to 3rd party RAM. I warned me about using 3rd party RAM and told me I almost lost my Apple Care coverage.

Do you think there is any truth to this? Could have the 3rd part Samsung RAM (same as the Apple factory RAM, or so I read) from Crucial pooped out my logic board?

I don't know, the whole situation was horrible and I never want to re-live that.
 
2 gb

i recently had the same situation, i changed to 1 gb, but performance was horrid, when i swithed to 2 gb, performance was excellent, i suggest going with 2gb
 
kas23 said:
Luckily, I still had my Apple Care and I brought it in. They had to replace the logic board and told me it was due to 3rd party RAM. I warned me about using 3rd party RAM and told me I almost lost my Apple Care coverage.

Do you think there is any truth to this? Could have the 3rd part Samsung RAM (same as the Apple factory RAM, or so I read) from Crucial pooped out my logic board?
Click to expand...
you could have done simple test of swapping in your old pre-install RAM to find out.

RAM kills mainboard? I probably want to see more facts on this before I believe it.

Anyway, Apple's threat is FUD. There will always be faulty RAMs (Even if we assume they are correct in saying its a RAM problem, which may, or may not be true in the first place). Even if you spend 300% more to buy from apple, they just grab from other RAM makers, you still have that risk of faulty RAMs.

PS. Always reinsert original RAM before you send it back for repair, so they don't give you may-be-false excuses. Third part RAM probably is the easy target since Im sure they would love to blame anything but themselves whenever possible.
 
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