Need help to decide what to component to upgrade on my Macbook

[clj7]

Hi people,

I have the previous generation Macbook which has a 13.3" display and no aluminium casing. It has a 100gb hard drive, 4gb RAM and Intel Core 2 Duo 2.00Ghz processor.

When I bought it 2 years ago, I purchased it with an extra 2gb of RAM to make it 4gb - which has been more than enough over the years. I also installed Windows 7 in bootcamp around the time it was released, as I needed Windows OS to use Solidworks.

I use Windows 7 these days when doing work, only because I need to use Soidworks. But recently I've noticed that my system is quite slow when I'm using multiple programs at once, such as Photoshop, Microsoft Office, Solidworks and Chrome.

I'm just starting to doubt the RAM that I'm using, is 4gb really enough? Would upgrading to 8gb be worth it, or would it be better upgrading the processor? Is 2.00Ghz considered fast these days?

thanks a bunch

edit: also the places where my Macbook goes really slow is when I'm saving my work, as my files in Photoshop and Solidworks are quite large. And I'm also using a second 42" display

 

[GGJstudios]

I'm just starting to doubt the RAM that I'm using, is 4gb really enough? Would upgrading to 8gb be worth it, or would it be better upgrading the processor? Is 2.00Ghz considered fast these days?

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

 

[clj7]

thanks for the advice, I'll try that now - I'll see how it is in 2-3 hours as that's when the strain usually kicks in.

Also, is there a similar way I could do this for the CPU?

thanks again

 

[Robert Davies]

thanks for the advice, I'll try that now - I'll see how it is in 2-3 hours as that's when the strain usually kicks in.

Also, is there a similar way I could do this for the CPU?

thanks again

Click the tab to the left (CPU) in Activity Monitor.

-Rob