Upgrading ram???

[Songbird86]

I have a white macbook that I bought in late 2010. I am going to start doing some video editing for my church and I downloaded Final Cut Pro. I noticed that my computer started running slow and would it be safe and worth it to upgrade my RAM to make it faster? And if so, how much should I upgrade to?
Here are my specs: Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo Memory: 2 GB 1067 MGz DDR3. I do some picture editing as well and I have several apps downloaded (Gimp, Istudio, Picasa) so I don't know if they are affecting the speed of my computer. I don't open them when I do my video editing, just to help speed things up but I really need some advice here and would appreciate it very much! Thanks a ton!

 

[GGJstudios]

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and look at the System Memory tab at the bottom. If your Page Outs are significant during normal use, you may benefit from more RAM. Be aware that Page Outs are cumulative since your last restart, so restart your Mac and track Page Outs under normal workload.


For performance issues, there are a few things you can check:

• Check your Login Items under System Preferences > Accounts to see what you have automatically launching.
• Also check /Library/LaunchAgents/ and /Users/yourusername/Library/LaunchAgents/ for items launching at startup
• Look at what widgets you may have running.
• Launch Activity Monitor and change "My Processes" at the top to "All Processes". Then look to see what may be consuming system resources.
• Take a look at the System Memory tab at the bottom of Activity Monitor to see if you have excessive "page outs", a sign that you may benefit from more RAM.
• Make sure you're not running any 3rd party antivirus app, as many of those will drain resources, reducing performance. They're not needed to protect your Mac.

 

[MacDawg]

RAM is fairly cheap and easy to install
And you would most likely see a performance benefit going from 2GB to 4GB