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Memory Question

D

DreamJ

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Apr 14, 2010
12
0
Hi everyone, thanks in advance for the help here.

My MBP is a 2010 model 15' model.
Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4GB 1067 MHz DDR3

Recently I realise that my MBP is running really slow so I have decided to upgrade the ram.

I have search the forum and someone recommend to purchase the ram at
www.crucial.com

I have search on that website and there are 2 8gb option - the only difference is one with 1.5V and the other one with 1.35V. Can someone explain to me which one is better for me please?

I am happy with the price on crucial.com but if someone has a better option then feel free to recommend it to me.

Also, is 8GB the highest ram that I can upgrade to?

Thank you once again.
 
DreamJ said:
Recently I realise that my MBP is running really slow so I have decided to upgrade the ram.
Click to expand...
Adding RAM may or may not help with slow performance, which be caused by many factors. To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

If you find you're not paging out, this may help with performance issues:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X
DreamJ said:
Also, is 8GB the highest ram that I can upgrade to?
Click to expand...
Yes. You can find specs on all Apple products, including maximum RAM:
 
GGJstudios said:
Adding RAM may or may not help with slow performance, which be caused by many factors. To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. If your page outs are zero or very low during normal use, you probably won't see any performance improvement from adding RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

If you find you're not paging out, this may help with performance issues:

Performance Tips For Mac OS X

Yes. You can find specs on all Apple products, including maximum RAM:
Click to expand...

Thank you for the replied. I have checked and my page outs is like what you said zero. So I'll go thru the performance tips that you recommend and get back to you. Thank you.

One more question is my MBP usually works fine when I just restart but as it get longer it get slower. So upgrading ram still wouldn't help?
 
DreamJ said:
One more question is my MBP usually works fine when I just restart but as it get longer it get slower. So upgrading ram still wouldn't help?
Click to expand...
If you have no page outs under normal workloads, adding RAM will not improve performance.
 
8gb will be the most you can add. The advice re: page outs is good though.

Actually the best sup grade you could make would be to replace your hard drive with an SSD. That will make a huge difference to the speed of the machine. I'd recommend Crucial M4 or Samsung 830 SSDs and it's an easy DIY. The only downside may be less capacity - depending on how much you're willing to spend.

Best of luck.

PS - If you have any drive, always keep a backup
 
Another vote for an SSD. That's the biggest thing you can do to improve performance. For RAM I put this is in, works great.
 
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Thank you guys for the reply ... I have done the performance tips recommended by GGJstudios and is now better ... Apparently my hard disk is overloaded which slow my computer down ... I'll have a look into the SSD ... Cheers
 
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