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2GB RAM vast improvement over 1GB?

I

inlimbo

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jan 29, 2005
411
0
Sydney, Australia
Hi,

I was wondering whether I should upgrade my RAM. I have 1GB on my G4 PB. I don't have any complaints about the performance. Only that the other day M$ Excel was giving me hell and dieing every time I was trying to do a 'fill down' in a spreadsheet (now it seems to have stopped). But I was wondering if it would make my machine run a lot smoother.

Attached is a pic from activity monitor showing my memory usage. That is generally what it looks like. Sometimes I have more firefox tabs upon and that thing seems to suck memory like a infant child on a lactating breast! Time to upgrade?

Its the end of the financial year so Im looking to make a few tax deductions by buying hardware/software.

Cheers
inlimbo
 

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Where is the best place to get a RAM upgrade?

I'm considering an upgrade because I am running BootCamp at the moment. Prior to this, I tried Parallels and it was terribly slow. The way I see it, its easier to be able to switch between the two parititons with parallels because of the sort of work I am doing. But I just know Apple will set me back heaps...
 
You're RAM usage isn't horrible. Page outs are getting up there (when compared to your page ins), but not too bad. At that moment in time, you had plenty of available RAM.

Most people can always benefit from a RAM upgrade, but your situation doesn't look too bad.
 
If you want to run Parallels, I cannot recommend 2 GB enough!!.

If Windows is not your gig, 1 Gig is ok. 2Gigs is always a good idea on the MacBook.

Max.
 
Not sure if it makes any difference on the G4 PB, but on my MBP I notice that 1GB is a bottleneck if I try to run more than one PPC application at a time (having Photoshop, InDesign, and Word open at the same time was brutal). Since upgrading, using Rosetta is much better.
 
I had 1GB on my MacBook, then decided to upgrade to 2GB. It definitely is faster (boot time) and you don't have to worry about rebooting after having it on for a while. But in terms of games like World of Warcraft, I really cannot tell the difference.
 
JackSYi said:
I had 1GB on my MacBook, then decided to upgrade to 2GB. It definitely is faster (boot time) and you don't have to worry about rebooting after having it on for a while. But in terms of games like World of Warcraft, I really cannot tell the difference.
Click to expand...

That's interesting, I expected it to be the other way round... Not much different in boot times, but much better frame rates in game.
 
Balli said:
That's interesting, I expected it to be the other way round... Not much different in boot times, but much better frame rates in game.
Click to expand...
I think the game performance is much more closely linked to video card specs, not RAM.
 
I surprised to hear of boot time improvements. My iMac didn't speed up booting when I bumped RAM from 512MB->1.5GB->2GB.
 
maxvamp said:
If you want to run Parallels, I cannot recommend 2 GB enough!!.

If Windows is not your gig, 1 Gig is ok. 2Gigs is always a good idea on the MacBook.
Click to expand...

the OP said he had a G4 PB, so parallels is kinda out of the question... :rolleyes: :)


and to the OP: adding more ram would certainly help, since os x allocates a percentage of ram to each application depending on what you're doing, based on how much ram you have.. sooo, even though you're not completely used up, more ram will cause os x to allocate more ram to each application, thus making your machine run faster...at least as i understand it.
 
I have no plans to sell my machine any time soon. But I just looked up in system profiler to see that my machine has 2 x 512GB RAM. So that means I would have to buy 2 x 1 GB RAM stick or alternatively 1 x 2 GB RAM stick. Crap! Why on earth did I get 2 x 512 GB RAM. I got it BTO. I guess that is why.
Guess that makes to whole thing more expensive. Plus does it void my AppleCare protection plan?
 
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