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Need Advise! - More Ram?

A

AlphaBoy85

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 25, 2008
197
0
Earth.
I got 50 GB left on my MacBook, and every once and a while (NOT always!) the beach ball of death shows up.
Should I put some more Ram on my Mac or 50GB is enough? should I be calm over that ball?

Thanks a lot in advance, You guys are really the best!
 
^^ agreed

adding ram will not solve your lack of hd space

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
 
OoOops sorry! I'm new to computers in general!

Mac OS X Version 10.5.3
Processor 2.1 GHz Inter Core 2 Duo
Memory 1 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

MacDawg said:
^^ agreed

adding ram will not solve your lack of hd space

Woof, Woof - Dawg
pawprint.gif
Click to expand...

What should I do then?
 
if you want to upgrade your Hard drive, it isn't too hard and their are many video and picture tutorials google macbook hard drive updgrade
 
If you got the beach ball, it's not because you have too little hard drive space left. 50gb should be plenty for a computer to function normally. If the beach ball appears when you are opening up an application, then it could be an indication that the hard drive is too slow. If it freezes in middle of an application, then it's probably RAM or processor. It shouldn't involve the hard drive at all. Unless you 're saving work, of course.
 
What do you use your computer for? If it's not anything intensive then it should be the hard drive not the processor that's slowing you down. I would suggest changing to a faster hard drive if the beach ball bothers you a lot. Right now your hard drive is a 5400rpm one, you can change it to a 7200rpm one if you want to.
 
No, the difference between a 5400 and a 7200 RPM drive is not by itself going to cause beachballs - the difference in drive speed is marginal.

50 GB is more than enough free space as well, that ain't the problem either.

1 GB of RAM might be too little if you are multitasking programs frequently -- when there isn't enough RAM to keep programs and data in memory, the machine has to swap them on and off the hard drive, which creates a pause.

The other thing is to do a Repair Permissions with Disk Utility, and to boot from your OSX DVD, go into Utilities: Disk Utility and run a Repair Disk... just to make sure that everything is in order with your data on your disk.
 
50GB of space is good on any drive; did you do a disk permission repair recently? If you haven't you should do it.
 
Dashti said:
I got 50 GB left on my MacBook, and every once and a while (NOT always!) the beach ball of death shows up.
Should I put some more Ram on my Mac or 50GB is enough? should I be calm over that ball?

Thanks a lot in advance, You guys are really the best!
Click to expand...

Run Activity Monitor and check for under system memory for swap used. This figure indicates how much your system is using the swap file on the HDD. lower use is better. If it uses it a lot, then upgrade your memory.
 
As everyone is saying, 50 should be fine but what is the full size of the drive? 50 would be really nice if the drive was an 80 Gig drive. But if its a 250 Gig drive, then 50Gigs left isn't much anymore, and a good question is what could be taking up all that space.

On thing no one has brought up yet is if you leave your computer on overnight so that the OSX can do its nightly maintenance. If not, you can get a program called MacJanitor that you can run the program and it will run the nightly maintenance when you want to run it. Or, you can leave it on overnight and wont need the extra program.

And the rule of thumb with computers is more RAM the better, but you won't see the performance boost as much as you add more. Like 256MB to 512MB you will see lots of speed boost. 512 to 1 gig you will see some boost. 1 gig to 2 gig you will see some less boost. 2 gigs is usually when the more RAM you put in you barely see any boost for a normal user. You have 1 gig, so for a few bucks, you can give your computer a little more kick. Go on over to www.Crucial.com and order some more RAM if you want.
 
gehrbox said:
Run Activity Monitor and check for under system memory for swap used. This figure indicates how much your system is using the swap file on the HDD. lower use is better. If it uses it a lot, then upgrade your memory.
Click to expand...

Activity Monitor - System Memory - Swap used: 0 Bytes?
 
CanadaRAM said:
No, the difference between a 5400 and a 7200 RPM drive is not by itself going to cause beachballs - the difference in drive speed is marginal.

50 GB is more than enough free space as well, that ain't the problem either.

1 GB of RAM might be too little if you are multitasking programs frequently -- when there isn't enough RAM to keep programs and data in memory, the machine has to swap them on and off the hard drive, which creates a pause.

The other thing is to do a Repair Permissions with Disk Utility, and to boot from your OSX DVD, go into Utilities: Disk Utility and run a Repair Disk... just to make sure that everything is in order with your data on your disk.
Click to expand...

Thanks will do it when I get home and get back to you guys..
 
Honestly, I am not sure I see ANY problem at all!

The "ball of death", is not indicating that there is something wrong with your system (I get the feeling that this is what you think)

I get the ball sometimes as well sometimes; perhaps I am working on too many apps at the same time, maybe I do something too fast, so the HDD cant keep up (like saving a large photoshop document, opening expose, changing app, opening a web-page... stuff like that)

I am sure everyone else get the "ball" sometimes as well, right?

So UNLESS it is a real big issue for you, dont spend a fortune upgrading.

Consider buying a small external harddrive (like western digital passport), and move some files to that disk. Files that you would like to keep, but dont need on the machine at all times. This could free up a lot of space for you, its cheap, and you dont have to take your mac apart...
 
Thanks a lot for the suggestion bro, it makes no scene because I have 50.8 GB left! I think I'll go with the external HD.
Any idea how much is it? +$1000?
 
You can get external harddisks at pretty much any size, speed & price.

I suggest (and I have had several!) a Western Digital Passport 250GB. It is only 99$ - it is small, reliable, runs on USB-power (no need for extra power-adaptor) - check it out at amazon.com

...and of course you can get something thats bigger, faster, newer, whatever. But if you dont have a need to own the latest-latest-new-thing, this is a cheap, reliable sollution for you...
 
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