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More RAM or new computer?

igmolinav said:
I was about to buy more RAM to use with photo and video applications.
Click to expand...
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
 
Little use in upgrading a whole system just because of increased memory capacity. The new machines will likely still come with 4GB of memory as this is a good starting point that most users will be able to get by on without any issues.

Memory is dirt cheap now anyway. Even in the UK, I was amazed at how little it costs to get 8GB of memory.
 
MBP Ram:
8GB - ~$40
16GB ~$120

New MBP:
Baseline: $1,799
High end $2,199

I would go for the RAM, the MBP will last you at least 5 years, so your current one has plenty of life left in it.
 
Hi,

Thank you : ) !!! I'll go ahead to launch Activity Monitor,
but as I go to to that, I would also like to know where do
you get 16 GB of RAM for less than $120 ?? The one
from the link, from crucial, is a lot more in price.

Kind regards,

igmolinav : ) !!!
 
You can also type vm_stat into the terminal and report back the object cache hitrate. If that is not well over 5% the page outs you have don't really matter either. Also if the page outs are only slightly higher than the swap size, it means that the stuff in swap is hardly ever actually swapped and you are just very lazy with closing apps you don't use.
 
Hi,

Of all those brands that Newegg sells, is there one that you recommend the most?

I'll also type vm_stat into the terminal. I hope it is not so bad.

Thank you, kind regards,

igmolinav : ) !!!
 
Hi,

If newegg and crucial offer the same RAM, why
is crucial more expensive ?? Is their RAM better ??

Thank you, kind regards,

igmolinav : ) !!!
 
newegg just sells them for a lower price.
Retailers often lower prices to attract customers who later buy the more expensive stuff too. Brand stores usually don't sell below their recommended retail prices. They don't want to threaten the profit margin of retailers since they depend on those very much.
 
After seeing how SSD improved the boot speed and normal operation of my Mac Pro, at some point I might replace my hard drive in my MBP with one. In this case, though, I'll wait until 500GB drives are more affordable. $500 and more is still a lot of money (though not as much as I was expecting).
 
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