MacBook Owners - 4GB Necessary?

[radellaf]

thank all of you 2.16 and highers who so generously gave us 2.0's some cheap 2gb upgrades
.... just buy their old RAM, got my 2gb off of eBay from a MB-Pro who upgraded to 4gb, my price... $15 shipped

Wow, and I thought I got ripped off when it sold for $25. The only other genuine-apple-2gb on there had a BiN of $30, which would have been cool.

512MB module from my iBook G4 went for MUCH more, maybe it's more rare or something.


So, yeah, if you want 2GB, check eBay.

FWIW, try opening a terminal and typing "top". look at number after "pageouts".

With 4GB the only way I can get it to use the swapfile is to open a HUGE image in Photoshop. Like a 2GB image, I mean.

However, I have to say the "shut down hard drives when possible" option in energy saver is useless. It will never spin down, even with 4GB, even when it's totally idle. Pretty stupid, but that's modern OSes for you. Disk-happy. Can't cache directories as well as MS-DOS could, either... try leaving a CD in the drive and see how often it just HAS to spin it up, just to read the directory, even if you're not even looking at that drive. <sigh>

 

[Bobioden]

I bumped mine to 4gb just because the price was so low. It might not help now, but I like that I am prepared for when or if I need it.

 

[jeremy.king]

When there is more installed memory, OS X dynamically takes advantage of it to optimize system performance where it can cache in memory operations that would otherwise be called as needed from the hard drive. More memory isn't necessarily going to make everything faster - but there are applications where significant gains are easily noticed + in general it reduces the spinning beachballs and pauses between application or even window swaps within an application. More memory tends to make the system overall more responsive.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/Memory_Benchmark/Apple_MacBook/

Going from 512MB to 1.0GB...1.0GB to 2.0GB are especially more noticeable... but the gains up to 4.0Gb are still significant too.

End of the day - it's whatever works for what you're doing and feel the need for. Having said that... Even for light use more memory may give you back 5-10 minutes a day that you might not have known you were missing with little pauses, etc - adds up quick.

Good to see you on MR, Larry.

I ordered my upgrade just now! From OWC of course.

-Jeremy

 

[SamoanDude]

I went to 4 gigs on all my Macs while it is cheap wether I needed it or not. I have seen ram prices go up 3X the price many times and stay up therre long enough to be really annoying.

 

[vr4playa]

Wow, and I thought I got ripped off when it sold for $25. The only other genuine-apple-2gb on there had a BiN of $30, which would have been cool.

funny thing is I just missed out on another one that sold for $28+shipping, it was at $14 w/ about 5 mins to go, put in a max bid of $25 w/ about 1:30 to go and was outbid, then this one was only at $10 and waited until about 45seconds to go and got it for $15+$3.50 shipping and since the seller made a mistake and accidentally sent me the router that was supposed to go to his sister, he refunded half the price to pay to ship the router back to him and his sister overnighted the RAM and I got it yesterday... now it's time to put it to use, got plenty of work to do on iMovie

 

[Daveoc64]

I upgraded to 4GB because I felt that 1GB wasn't enough.

The Integrated Graphics definitely benefit from it and it really helps with Windows/games.

I also thought that it would be a worthwhile investment for my computer, considering the next OS will almost certainly need it.

The only downside is the Kernel Panic with DVD Player.

 

[vr4playa]

4gb definitely helps if you're running Vista, funny since I was running a work computer for about 9 months on Vista w/ only 512mb

and I was wondering why it was sooooooooo slow....

btw i thought the 2.0 Duo's were only capable of up to 2gb???