Late 2009 2.26GHz C2D MacMini 16gb Upgrade?

[DanDunes818]

First, hello everyone. I'm brand new to the forum and relatively new to my Mac addiction. I am a Professional Motocross and Supercross journalist and blogger and it was just 12 months ago that I got my first Mac--or any Apple product. Now, including my kids, I have ten devices on my iCloud account. Anyways, my favorite part of owning the Mac's has been being able to tinker and upgrade. I upgraded my Late 2012 i5 MacMini, my Early 2011 i7 MacBook Pro and my Late 2009 C2D MacMini with SSD's and maxed them all out at 16gb, 16gb and 8gb of Ram respectively. While the 2009 MacMini is not a work machine (it's in the living room and a major contributor to our family viewing entertainment), I still find it running pretty low on it's 8gb Ram quite a bit when I have a stream and a few other App's running.

Alright, so my question is, has anyone upgraded the lLate '09 Mini to 16gb and had it work and if so, what Ram did they use? I would try the Ram sticks from my other machines but one is 1333 and the other is 1600. I mean, when I first bought the thing, the guy I bought it from said it was maxed out at 4gb and so did the Apple help page, but it works with 8gb. So, why not 16gb?

Anywho, sorry to be so long winded, I just thought because I'm new I would work a little about me into the question.

 

[xylitol]

Hi, also have Late 2009 MM with 8GB + an SSD. I don't think it would take 16GB. If it did, that would be general knowledge by now.

http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_mini/specs/mac-mini-core-2-duo-2.26-late-2009-specs.html

I still find it running pretty low on it's 8gb Ram quite a bit when I have a stream and a few other App's running.

How have you determined that? Activity Monitor / Memory pane / Memory Used (not the right place) or Memory Pressure (the right place)?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201464

 

[DanDunes818]

How have you determined that? Activity Monitor / Memory pane / Memory Used (not the right place) or Memory Pressure (the right place)?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201464

I run a program on my Mac's Memory Clean and while i'm never under 20% memory available on my 16gb machines, i'm under 10% available on my '09 quite a bit. Not going to pretend I know what it all means..lol

 

[xylitol]

Yea, those percentages are quite pointless. Memory is available (for apps) on an "on-demand" basis, and modern OS X, by design, uses the rest of the available (meaning installed) RAM for optimizing purposes.

"The Activity Monitor is a utility that comes by default with OSX. As long as the memory pressure graph is in the green your system has enough RAM available."

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/1756865/

 

[DanDunes818]

Thanks a ton for your responses. That makes a lot of sense now and clears up other questions I had about memory. I was wondering why/how I use 4-5gb of Ram when I have absolutely nothing running. I just think back to when we had one gb of ram and were all good so it blew my mind when I see i'm running 4 gb idling. But, now that you explained it that way it makes more sense.

Now back to enjoying my newest Apple addiction purchase: the 24" Cinema Display I picked up today off Craigslist. Man, I LOVE this thing.