I am pretty new to mac. I purchased this one a little over a year ago. Since I purchased it Apple came out with an updated or new operating system which I downloaded. A few weeks ago my hard drive crashed and I had it replaced. The technician said I should upgrade my 4GB of ram to 8GB because of the new operating system. He said it could be upgraded for a little over 100 bucks. Is this sound advice or is he just trying to sell me something I don't need?
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OSX Version 10.8.5
- Thread starter ChipperDean
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Your laptop probably came with an earlier version of Mountain Lion (10.8). The latest update, 10.8.5, isn't really a "new" OS, but a bunch of bug fixes, security enhancements and other little improvements.
The new OS, Mavericks 10.9 is due to be released in a month or so. It should run fine on 4Gb of RAM.
However, you can never have too much money or too much RAM.
RAM is "where your computer puts stuff when its working on it".
A good analogy is a kitchen or workshop. Your hard drive is the cupboards where you keep things. When you want to do stuff, you take it out of the cupboards and put it on the work surfaces. (That's RAM.) The more work surfaces you have, the more stuff you can get out of the cupboards and spread around, and still have space to work, before you have to put stuff back.
Memory modules are usually pretty cheap, and they are a user-serviceable part on most Macs, so you could buy them online and install them yourself.
The new OS, Mavericks 10.9 is due to be released in a month or so. It should run fine on 4Gb of RAM.
However, you can never have too much money or too much RAM.
RAM is "where your computer puts stuff when its working on it". A good analogy is a kitchen or workshop. Your hard drive is the cupboards where you keep things. When you want to do stuff, you take it out of the cupboards and put it on the work surfaces. (That's RAM.) The more work surfaces you have, the more stuff you can get out of the cupboards and spread around, and still have space to work, before you have to put stuff back.
Memory modules are usually pretty cheap, and they are a user-serviceable part on most Macs, so you could buy them online and install them yourself.
Restart your machine then use it normally for a day or two. Then start Activity Monitor and check the system memory tab for page outs. If you have no page outs, you are not going to benefit from more memory.
Depends what you want to use your Mac for. Everyday stuff like email, internet, word processing etc, then 4Gig is ample. If however, yiu want to do a lot of video editing in something like Final Cut then maybe get the extra.
Look at Weaselboy posted and this will tell you all you need to know.