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Need more RAM on MBA

B

beej210

macrumors newbie
Original poster
I know the RAM isn't upgradeable as it's directly on the motherboard, but is there a way to use an SD card like with Windows or something else while the computer is "docked" on my desk?

Don't care how big or clunky it is, just want more speed
 
beej210 said:
I know the RAM isn't upgradeable as it's directly on the motherboard, but is there a way to use an SD card like with Windows or something else while the computer is "docked" on my desk?

Don't care how big or clunky it is, just want more speed
Click to expand...

Do you have 2GB or 4GB? Just wondering what you are using that is taxing the stock RAM.
 
beej210 said:
I know the RAM isn't upgradeable as it's directly on the motherboard, but is there a way to use an SD card like with Windows or something else while the computer is "docked" on my desk?

Don't care how big or clunky it is, just want more speed
Click to expand...

You can use an SD Card as storage but as RAM, you're SOL. SD Card read speeds are significantly slow compared to RAM.
 
I've got 4gb, and I use "FreeMemory" to help free up RAM. I have Outlook, 2 excel sheets, Parallels (scaled down to 512mb), and Firefox open
 
bogatyr said:
With the built in SSD, RAM shouldn't be a big deal. Paging on an SSD is much faster than a HDD.
Click to expand...

Yes, but the SSD is still over 20 times slower than RAM.

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beej210 said:
I've got 4gb, and I use "FreeMemory" to help free up RAM. I have Outlook, 2 excel sheets, Parallels (scaled down to 512mb), and Firefox open
Click to expand...

Those apps usually slow down your system even more.
 
theSeb said:
Yes, but the SSD is still over 20 times slower than RAM.
Click to expand...

Of course it isn't as good as RAM, otherwise SSDs would replace RAM.

My point is that it isn't very noticeable when your system runs out of physical RAM when doing typical tasks. Aside from something like video editing/CAD work - running out of RAM doesn't have much of an impact on SSD systems. Even running a few VMs which fills up my RAM doesn't cause me any slowdown on my MBA.
 
I've had problems with Parallels eating RAM... mucking around with the RAM settings hasn't done a whole lot. It may be my usage within Parallels, not sure.

Since I have 8Gb RAM on one machine and 16 Gb on the other, it's not a huge concern for me so I've never gotten to the bottom of it.
 
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