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I hate my MacBook!!
- Thread starter Eldiablojoe
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I never wrote upgrading the RAM is a bad idea. Read my first post in this thread, please.
We have now established that the OP will profit from a memory upgrade, but his memory pressure is not that bad and if he wouldn't multitask 5 apps he would actually be somewhat fine. If memory pressure is green, there is no benefit to upgrading RAM. However, he will notice an immediate performance boost from an ssd in any case. I still think that his UI lag has other causes, too.
But since he needs to upgrade RAM and ssd anyway he can start with that.
You are right, that upgrading from 2gb to 4gb is not expensive. My bad.
The more capacity you can afford, the better. SSD prices in storage sizes you are used to see in spinners are still extremely high. However some Macs do have limitations on the kind of SSD they can take: for example my 2009 MB can't be fit with a 6Gbps drive because it won't clock down nicely to 3Gbps, but to 1.5Gbps. In rare cases causes unexpected system corruption, otherwise a known bug from the nVidia chipset.
And how's mine looking?
http://image.bayimg.com/5af31da13ad75cea3540287272aa8a56f4a9aa15.jpg(Edited: don't know why it doesn't display)
A small SSD itself will already be $100. RAM would be $601. Upgrade RAM (find the memory specs:--> 'about this mac')
2. Put in an ssd
These upgrades might run you around $100 and your macbook should be better than new.
He could choose to reinstall a previous Mac OS X.
I personally went with OWC. Although not critical for the SSD part, I really appreciated their knowledgeable tech support and nice customer reps. And the very reasonable shipping charge as well, unlike other major websites.
On the other hand, I wouldn't trust "any" RAM in a Mac. While they are much less picky as in the PowerPC days, I stick to Mushkin. Kingston is overpriced. As usual, YMMV, but RAM issues are usually hard to diagnose when they happen. Better not take chances with it.
They used to be, but caved in to the fashion of fast development cycles.
Where I live you can get a used pair of 2x2gb ram sticks for about 20€. A 256gb crucial ssd for 80€ new.
I estimated $100.
The OP does not seem to be keen on reinstalling OSs. From my experience Yosemite has the best memory managment in an OS so far and even if it wouldn't, the OP wrote that his macbook was slow out of the box. Since a memory and ssd upgrade seems inevitable, I would start there.
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What are you doing to get your memory pressure that high?
It is terrible advice, to tell somebody to reboot their computer in order to quit their apps. Are you listening to yourself?
2GB of RAM is not the huge bottleneck you seem to think. Plenty of people on this forum have posted that Yosemite and their software is running fine on their 2GB MBAs.
And the idea that you load a certain number of applications into RAM is wrong. If an app is idle, it will mostly get paged to disk and then have very little impact on how much RAM is available for other programs. The important part is that it can be paged to disk quickly, and that's where an SSD comes in.
True that it uses as much memory as possible. False that more RAM always makes a massive impact.
Applications store the data they need in memory. If all their data is stored in RAM, then adding more RAM won't make a difference. What would the applications store in the additional RAM? They're not just going to invent data to put there.
Nobody ever said it was a bad idea. Just because some people are trying to understand the problem better doesn't mean we think RAM upgrades are bad.
And again, the correct advice to the OP is to get an SSD before a RAM upgrade. Ideally get both, but an SSD is the higher priority. It will give him all the usual benefits of having an SSD and also mitigate his relative lack of RAM. Again, I point to all the people who are happily using 2GB MBAs, and that's because they have SSDs.
As for which RAM to get, I would avoid white-label RAM but other than that, doesn't really matter. If you get defective RAM it's not hard to diagnose. I believe Apple even puts a memory checker in its firmware.
As for SSDs, Samsung drives have a good reputation (and Apple uses them too, for whatever that's worth) and they're at most only a few dollars more than other brands so if I were to buy a drive today it would be a Samsung. But like with RAM, it's probably hard to buy a bad SSD these days. (Unlike 5 years ago.)
I would just by the current MBA today. It runs perfect.
If they release something entirely new with retina we know that the first revision is gonna have lag and heat problems just like the first macbook pro retina.
If you just want a problem with no beach ball, buy the current air.
If they release something entirely new with retina we know that the first revision is gonna have lag and heat problems just like the first macbook pro retina.
If you just want a problem with no beach ball, buy the current air.
Where do you find a 256GB SSD for this price?
Just regular browsing, a few utilities, no more. The Docks shows it all.What are you doing to get your memory pressure that high?
If you just go to Amazon and type in SSD, you will see several ~250GB ones for $105 to $110.
I can't see your screen shot of activity monitor but would be interested to know how some web browsing is maxing out your RAM. If you are using Chrome, you can go to the Window menu and then Task Manager and it will tell you how much RAM and CPU each tab is using BTW.
Anywhere between 120$ and 250$, indeed.
Just click the link, I don't know why it doesn't display. Web browsing always does that, regardless of OS or browser.
Guess SSD prices are different in Spain. In the US, I'm seeing a 250GB Samsung drive for $105.
Weird, your picture didn't display in Chrome (got a 40-something access forbidden error) but it did come up in Safari.
Looks like the web pages you have open are taking a huge amount of memory. I don't know if that's normal for Safari. I have a bunch of stuff open in Chrome right now and most of the pages are 50MB or less, whereas most of yours look to be 150MB or more. Maybe try Chrome and see if that improves things?
Spain? I wish I was here!
Please use a proper browser. That means Safari or Firefox. The usage you see is consistent with what I get across platforms and browsers, and I don't visit the same websites.
Your image displayed for me btw.
I have a mac mini with an hdd and 4 gb ram. I can multitask browsing with a few tabs open, edit 30mb raw files in Lightroom and office apps. The memory pressure never goes into the yellow from that.
I honestly do not know what makes peoples experiences that different.
All I can assume is that there is some software bug in your system.
Software bug across OSes, Mac OS X versions and across browsers? Seems unlikely IMHO.
Ok- this is stupid. I got the new RAM and SSD. I installed them. When I turn back on the MacBook, I get a grey screen with a flashing icon of a file folder with a question mark superimposed on it.
It occurs to me, perhaps this new drive needs to be formatted and OS X installed. How do I do that if I cannot get it past the grey screen?
Should I have used CCC to clone my current HDD to the new SSD (using the external enclosure they provided), and then switch out the drives?
It occurs to me, perhaps this new drive needs to be formatted and OS X installed. How do I do that if I cannot get it past the grey screen?
Should I have used CCC to clone my current HDD to the new SSD (using the external enclosure they provided), and then switch out the drives?
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It depends if you want doing a clean install or not. I used the CCC method on my 2010 Mini... cloned the HDD to the SSD inside an external enclosure, then I tested if everything worked by booting from USB (Command + R at startup, then select USB drive). If everything went fine, switch the drives.
Maybe you'll have to do a "repair permissions" on Disk Utility after switching. The Mini was taking forever to wake up. Repairing permissions solved the issue. If you prefer clean installing OSX, you could format the SSD by running the Disk Utility bundled with OSX DVD.
The only OS disk I might still have is old- Snow Leopard. I was going to clone onto the new SSD then swap, but if I could do a clean install to Yosemite, I would. Should the SSD be formatted to RAID Mac OS Extended (Journaled)?
The Snow Leopard install DVD contains a recovery mode which includes Disk Utility.
You should format to Mac OS Extended (Journaled), but not RAID.
Doing a clean install of Snow Leopard, then apply updates to 10.6.8, then upgrade to Yosemite seems to be a good plan.
I'd already started cloning to the SSD via CCC. I'll let you know how things turn out.
I'm late to this party, but I'm willing to bet you're going to be happy with the upgrades. In 30-some years of ever-evolving upgrades (beginning with my first, a 4K to 16K improvement on a TRS-80 in the early 80s), I can't recall any single upgrade that offered as much instant satisfaction as the HD to SSD bump.
Good luck.
Is this a system that's supposed to be Yosemite compatible or have you spoofed it in some way. Have an old black MacBook with an SSD and added Ram that's currently stuck on Lion or Mountain Lion because of limitations that Apple imposed.
2008 Aluminium MacBook. It's the oldest MacBook that Yosemite will run on.
I was amazed at how much smoother everything was after installing Yosemite (as an upgrade no less) - Mavericks was really awful on this thing.