MacBookPro 4'1 (model identifier) 15" with 6GB ram

[wheelhot]

Hello,
I am currently planning to upgrade my 2gb RAM and I heard that my model supports up to 6GB of RAM, hence I am planning to upgrade to that size cause Aperture uses LOTS of memory and I use Aperture a lot.

I am planning to get it from here
OWC 6GB PC5300 DDR2 667MHz DIMM Upgrade Kit

Everything is cool and all until I find out that some users are having kernel panics on OSX 10.6 with 6GB RAM (which is what I am using).

It is now 10.6.3, so anyone care to report if it is safe to use 6GB or the problem still exist?

 

[ayeying]

Hello,
I am currently planning to upgrade my 2gb RAM and I heard that my model supports up to 6GB of RAM, hence I am planning to upgrade to that size cause Aperture uses LOTS of memory and I use Aperture a lot.

I am planning to get it from here
OWC 6GB PC5300 DDR2 667MHz DIMM Upgrade Kit

Everything is cool and all until I find out that some users are having kernel panics on OSX 10.6 with 6GB RAM (which is what I am using).

It is now 10.6.3, so anyone care to report if it is safe to use 6GB or the problem still exist?

You get kernel panics when you use 8GB, not 6GB. I haven't heard of any reports of KP with 6GB.

 

[m85476585]

I've had no problems with 6gb for over a year. (Except the memory leak, but that seems to be affecting people with standard amounts of RAM too.)

 

[wheelhot]

I've had no problems with 6gb for over a year. (Except the memory leak, but that seems to be affecting people with standard amounts of RAM too.)

Oh, well my current 2gb has been pretty flawless so far except for the tendency for Safari to crash whenever some apps cause a slowdown (usually Aperture).

What are the usual symptoms of memory leak? Kernel panics, beach balls and does a software crashing lots of time count?

You get kernel panics when you use 8GB, not 6GB. I haven't heard of any reports of KP with 6GB.

Thanks for the reply, I emailed OWC, so I'll wait for their response also, meanwhile more opinion from forum members whom successfully run 6gb (from the Apple support 4gb maximum RAM) on Snow Leopard is welcomed

 

[gwsat]

I emailed OWC, so I'll wait for their response also, meanwhile more opinion from forum members whom successfully run 6gb (from the Apple support 4gb maximum RAM) on Snow Leopard is welcomed

I bought the DDR2 6Gb upgrade kit from OWC that you linked to in your first post. My MBP3,1 has the same 6Gb limitation that your MBP4,1 has. I added the additional memory nearly two months ago and my MBP's performance improved dramatically. I ran Fusion and Windows even when I had only 2Gb of RAM. Windows apps worked but were slow and, often, unstable. Ever since I upgraded to 6Gb of RAM, though, I run Fusion in Unity mode. This allows me to keep several Windows apps open on the OS X desktop and use the -tab key combination to switch from any open app to any other, regardless of whether it is a Windows or an OS X app. I could not have asked for more.

 

[ayeying]

Thanks for the reply, I emailed OWC, so I'll wait for their response also, meanwhile more opinion from forum members whom successfully run 6gb (from the Apple support 4gb maximum RAM) on Snow Leopard is welcomed

Read my post about this that I posted over a year ago.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/573906/

 

[wheelhot]

I bought the DDR2 6Gb upgrade kit from OWC that you linked to in your first post. My MBP3,1 has the same 6Gb limitation that your MBP4,1 has. I added the additional memory nearly two months ago and my MBP's performance improved dramatically. I ran Fusion and Windows even when I had only 2Gb of RAM. Windows apps worked but were slow and, often, unstable. Ever since I upgraded to 6Gb of RAM, though, I run Fusion in Unity mode. This allows me to keep several Windows apps open on the OS X desktop and use the -tab key combination to switch from any open app to any other, regardless of whether it is a Windows or an OS X app. I could not have asked for more.

Great to hear that.

Yeah, you got that right about the same limitation. Currently I am occasionally running Parallels in Crystal mode with my 2gb ram and apps has been running fine and smoothly (I had Safari with a few tabs open and everything still work smoothly, and recently I added opening A3 onto the mix and surprisingly A3 run quite ok (in the management part at least) with Parallels running)

Out of curiosity, what version of Fusion are you running and I strongly recommend you to try Parallels, I used to be a Fusion fan but find the unity feature to be buggy and unbearable. Saw a review about Parallels 5 beating Fusion 3 in almost aspects, I decided to give Parallels a second look and I am amazed till today, I never looked back. The Crystal mode is awesome, it feels like Windows is part of OS X! (Steve will be sooo mad at me for saying that )

Oh and I assume you are running on OSX 10.6.3?

Read my post about this that I posted over a year ago.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/573906/

Thanks! how come that never showed on google

 

[ayeying]

Thanks! how come that never showed on google

It was my 2nd hit on google

 

[gwsat]

Out of curiosity, what version of Fusion are you running and I strongly recommend you to try Parallels, I used to be a Fusion fan but find the unity feature to be buggy and unbearable. Saw a review about Parallels 5 beating Fusion 3 in almost aspects, I decided to give Parallels a second look and I am amazed till today, I never looked back. The Crystal mode is awesome, it feels like Windows is part of OS X! (Steve will be sooo mad at me for saying that )

Oh and I assume you are running on OSX 10.6.3?

I was running Fusion 3.02 but installed 3.1 beta last month. The beta version has been just fine for my relatively modest needs but some of the power users have had trouble with it. Unity just doesn't work properly unless it has a lot of memory. My Wired plus Active memory always exceeds 4Gb, so it's no wonder that Fusion and Windows struggled when I had only 2Gb installed. The current version of Parallels has been getting good reviews but I think that it continues to be just as big a memory hog as Fusion. That seems to be a given with such program. I plan to stick with Fusion, primarily because I have used it for more than 2 years and have become comfortable with it. Anyway, I could not ask for more of any virtualization program than Fusion has given me since I upgraded to 6Gb of RAM.

 

[m85476585]

What are the usual symptoms of memory leak? Kernel panics, beach balls and does a software crashing lots of time count?

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/868744/

No kernel panics or crashes. Just the amount of memory used by applications doesn't add up to the total amount of memory used. If I quit all my open programs, activity monitor will still show several GB in use. Even logging out doesn't reset everything; only rebooting completely resets it.

Since I have 6gb, I rarely run into a low RAM situation even if the memory leak is big, but sometimes if I try to run Fusion, the computer will run out of RAM and slow down or beachball as stuff is swapped to the disk.

I don't know if this problem is related to having 6gb.

 

[wheelhot]

Thanks for the help guys, I just checked my mail and got the reply from OWC tech support, though I expected the reply to be longer

There should be no issues with running that set up.

As quoted from the email

 

[alphaod]

Thanks for the help guys, I just checked my mail and got the reply from OWC tech support, though I expected the reply to be longer


As quoted from the email

I'd call them next time; they are really helpful on the phone. Even though, they can be pricier at times compared to say NewEgg, I find I'm quite willing to pay the extra $5 on RAM or the extra $10 on an HDD because of the support they give you if anything goes wrong or if you just have crap load of questions.