Do I have bad RAM?

[Waiting4MacBook]

I don't know all that much about RAM at all so please bear with me. I recently upgraded my 1.87ghz MBP from 1 gb to 2gb of RAM. The RAM I got was Centon 1gb DDR2-667 PC2-5300 200pin and was guaranteed to be compatible with MBP. It shows up in System Profiler and says OK next to it. I just feel like it should be much faster or at least not "choke" as much when performing multiple tasks. The computer seems to be acting almost exactly the same as with just the single 1gb stick. Still pinwheels quite a bit when opening movies and pictures from QT and iPhoto. Also I have about 19gb free space on my drive. Any thoughts? Thanks in advance.

Here's what System Profiler shows me.

BANK 0/DIMM0:

Size: 1 GB
Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Speed: 667 MHz
Status: OK

BANK 1/DIMM1:

Size: 1 GB
Type: DDR2 SDRAM
Speed: 667 MHz
Status: OK

 

[WildCowboy]

Open up Activity Monitor and go to the "System Memory" pane down at the bottom. Keep it open for a while and periodically check your "Page ins/outs"...how do they look?

 

[Waiting4MacBook]

Hmmm. Well I don't know how it's supposed to look but I don't like the fact that it says 39847/0. Does that mean the new one's not working?

 

[WildCowboy]

That means you're not getting any page outs, which is great...your RAM is able to handle everything you're throwing at it right now without having to swap out data to the disk (a slow process).

Not sure why you're seeing slowdowns, but they do happen.

 

[Waiting4MacBook]

Well thanks I guess that's good. But shouldn't I have seen a noticeable speed increase by putting in an extra gig of RAM? I feel like I've seen no change at all. I'll keep an eye on those page outs and see if anything changes. Thanks.

 

[WildCowboy]

Adding RAM doesn't increase speed. It widens a bottleneck that slows your computer down under high demand. So if your MBP was running fine with 1 GB, you wouldn't see a difference when you added the second stick. But that doesn't really gibe with your current pinwheeling experiences.

 

[Waiting4MacBook]

OK well thanks anyway. Maybe I was just spoiled with the 1gb.