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RAM's effect

K

kennb

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Hi,

I'm thinking of upgrading my 2.1ghz 1gb ram macbook to 4gb.

I have just bought Parallels because I thought it would be a lot easier than boot camp (I need to move files from Windows - mac etc and its alot easier). Unfortuantely when Parallels is on the whole computer is unusable and freezes up constantly.

Will 4gb ram make my mac fast when running parallels and other programs side by side?

Also I used to play Live For Speed with bootcamp. Will the 4gb upgrade make much difference to my FPS?

Thanks,

Kenny
 
kennb said:
Hi,

I'm thinking of upgrading my 2.1ghz 1gb ram macbook to 4gb.

I have just bought Parallels because I thought it would be a lot easier than boot camp (I need to move files from Windows - mac etc and its alot easier). Unfortuantely when Parallels is on the whole computer is unusable and freezes up constantly.

Will 4gb ram make my mac fast when running parallels and other programs side by side?

Also I used to play Live For Speed with bootcamp. Will the 4gb upgrade make much difference to my FPS?

Thanks,

Kenny
Click to expand...


The real question is why wouldn't you? 🙂 How much is 4GB of RAM? Like $30?
 
Yeah I know, £40 from crucial for 4gb.

Just wondering how big an effect it will have. If I run parallels will I still have a bit of trouble or will it be super-quick etc ?
 
"Super quick" is relative, but your MB will benefit from an increase in the available RAM. Running XP in Parallels as well as the parent OS, along with whatever other apps are running will definitely create noticeable performance deficiencies under a single GB.

How much of that current RAM are you allocating to the virtual machine? 512MB? How fast can any XP box run (much less your Mac) with only a half a Gig available?

What's happening now is that the hard drive is being used for virtual memory, probably to an excessive amount, performance-wise. Just upgrade the RAM.
 
Upgrading your RAM will make a world of a difference, and it will immediately be noticeable.
 
kennb said:
Yeah I know, £40 from crucial for 4gb.

Just wondering how big an effect it will have. If I run parallels will I still have a bit of trouble or will it be super-quick etc ?
Click to expand...

It will make a huge difference. I have 2 notebooks, a pre-Santa Rosa chipset MBP with 3GB and a Santa Rosa MB with 4GB of memory. I need to run a Windows Server 2003 development environment that requires 2GB of memory dedicated to it. It runs well on the 4GB machine, and not well at all on the 3GB machine.

FWIW, VMWare's Fusion seems to tread more lightly on system resources than Parallels, leading me to switch to Fusion a year or so ago.
 
My goodness yes - get all the ram you can out of your computer ASAP, especially for VM's.

And the price of 2gb 667mhz sticks of ram is ridiculously low.
 
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