Thursday, May 24. 2007
New Memory for the Mac
After suffering in silence trying to make do with the 2 GB of memory that comes with the MacBookPro (mainly because both Microsoft Outlook under Parallels and Firefox seem to be memory hogs), I decided to take the plunge and boost the memory to 3GB (which is the highest amount currently that the Apple MacBookPro will take  ). The installation of the new 2 GB memory stick was very painless and quick (under 5 minutes) and there are several good tutorials on the internet (here and here) for this as well. Needless to say, my MacBookPro has been running much more swiftly with the additional RAM (since the OS no longer has to spend valuable time swapping  ).For those interested in why there is a 3 GB limit (in both Windows Vista and Mac OSX), there are a couple of articles (here and here) that I have come across which seems to imply that this limit is more of a hardware issue and not a OS issue. As a side note, there have been various discussions about whether the MacBookPro will run better with 2x2GB memory sticks (even though only 3 GB will actually be used by the OS) versus 2 GB + 1 GB stick (even though the memory is unmatched). The results seem to be inconclusive (although some testers said that having unmatched pairs didn't cause any slowdown {here (see comments) and here}). As for my personal experience, I can conclusively say that my MacBookPro runs much faster with the additional 1 GB of RAM. I would conclude that the performance boost I gain from not having to access (disk) swap for memory significantly outweighs any potential slowdown I am getting by not having matched memory. |  |
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