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Yes that means you’ll have to install it yourself, but if you can use a screw driver, you can install RAM. You can save a lot of money by not buying RAM directly from Apple, so go with a third party vendor instead. #CHANGE MEMORY APPLE MACBOOK PRO 2011 UPGRADE#Where to Buy an 8GB Upgrade for MacBook Pro I definitely have my eye on the Seagate Momentus XT 500 SSD Hybrid Drive now, which combines a 7200 RPM standard disk with a smaller SSD drive for active files and caching, apparently the performance is absolutely blazing for the price (about $130). ![]() I think if you really want to squeeze the most performance, maxing out the RAM and then upgrading the MacBook Pro hard drive is probably the ultimate combination. I think the only problem with upgrading to 8GB of RAM is that now I want to relieve the other performance bottle-neck, the stock 5400 RPM hard disk. #CHANGE MEMORY APPLE MACBOOK PRO 2011 MAC#Reading a few system indicators, you can find out if your Mac needs a RAM upgrade if you aren’t sure that it would benefit you. The average computer user probably doesn’t need 8GB of RAM, but any power user or tech worker will greatly enjoy the additional memory. If you find yourself grinding around in virtual memory on a semi-regular basis, you will be thrilled with the speed increase. If you use a ton of applications at once, you will notice the difference. The price of an 8GB upgrade is cheap enough now that the gain in system performance is worth it. Yes, particularly if you’re a power user. Is upgrading the MacBook Pro to 8GB of RAM worth it? ![]() The MacBook Pro simply performs better with 8GB of RAM. With 8GB I am doing the same work now that I was earlier today, but earlier today I was using 1.5GB of swap and now there is none being used, the difference is remarkable – no more beach balls and halts. #CHANGE MEMORY APPLE MACBOOK PRO 2011 MAC OS X#The reason for the slowdown I mentioned earlier, when Mac OS X is forced to start swapping data from physical memory to the 5400 RPM hard drive you feel the drag. If you throw in a virtual machine, you’ve long hit the point of painful slowdowns. On a daily basis I frequently have the following apps open all at once: Photoshop, iTunes, Preview, Terminal, Transmit, Transmission, Text Wrangler, iChat, and here’s the real RAM hog: Safari, Chrome, Firefox, when you have three web browsers open at once with a ton of tabs open, your system will often slow to a crawl (web developers in particular can relate here). 8GB vs 4GB on the MacBook ProĤGB of RAM is a good amount but 8GB is better. Anytime you can avoid using virtual memory your Mac will perform faster since it does not need to access memory contents from the slow spinning hard drive, remember the default HD speed in a MacBook Pro is a rather slow 5400 RPM, the speed of RAM blows this away. I have a ton of apps open right now and I’m not even close to hitting virtual memory (you can read more about virtual memory in Mac OS X here). This is what I see now in Activity Monitor:Īs you can see, there are no “Page outs” (the movement of data from RAM to hard disk). Why? RAM is fast and virtual memory is slow, with 8GB of RAM the threshold to hit swap is significantly higher. Yes, it is noticeably faster especially under heavy app usage and system load. So now I’ll try to answer some common questions about having a Mac with 8GB of RAM: From start to finish it takes maybe 10 minutes at most.
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