Fresh install if upgrading RAM?

[dasx]

Well. Title sums it all pretty OK. Do you think a fresh install would make any difference if I'm planning to upgrade the RAM on a Mini?

It's got 2GB and I plan to put 8GB into it. Something tells me the OS would install differently if it finds either 2 or 8GB available, that's why I'm thinking about doing a fresh install. (Maybe due to my years in Linux were I defined my SWAP partition's size depending on how much RAM I had).

Thanks!

 

[MisterMe]

...

It's got 2GB and I plan to put 8GB into it. Something tells me the OS would install differently if it finds either 2 or 8GB available, that's why I'm thinking about doing a fresh install. ...

Something is full of it. What something does not seem to understand is that the amount of RAM installed has nothing to do with an OS installation. Your operating system in installed on your HDD or SSD, not your RAM. Doing a Clean Install is a useless exercise under most circumstances. Doing it because of a RAM upgrade has to be one of the dumbest reasons that I ever heard of. No wonder something gets such poor grades in school. You shouldn't listen to him.

 

[dasx]

Something is full of it. What something does not seem to understand is that the amount of RAM installed has nothing to do with an OS installation. Your operating system in installed on your HDD or SSD, not your RAM. Doing a Clean Install is a useless exercise under most circumstances. Doing it because of a RAM upgrade has to be one of the dumbest reasons that I ever heard of. No wonder something gets such poor grades in school. You shouldn't listen to him.

Well, I based my question on my experience in Linux some years ago. I had to create a 1GB SWAP partition if I had 512MB of RAM. If I upgraded to 1GB, I needed to resize the partition to 2GB in order to have a better performance.

That's why I asked. Glad I won't need to lose time reinstalling!

 

[Weaselboy]

Well, I based my question on my experience in Linux some years ago. I had to create a 1GB SWAP partition if I had 512MB of RAM. If I upgraded to 1GB, I needed to resize the partition to 2GB in order to have a better performance.

That's why I asked. Glad I won't need to lose time reinstalling!

Your question is not illogical given your Linux experience, but OS X will see the RAM upgrade on its own and automatically adjust the swap. There is also a sleep image that is auto-sized based on RAM. You can read about it here.

I remember setting the swap size on I think it was a Redhat 4.2 install years ago.

 

[dasx]

Your question is not illogical given your Linux experience, but OS X will see the RAM upgrade on its own and automatically adjust the swap. There is also a sleep image that is auto-sized based on RAM. You can read about it here.

Thank you!

I remember setting the swap size on I think it was a Redhat 4.2 install years ago.

You can still do it 'manually' if you want. Distros such as Ubuntu, which are completely user friendly let you go for kind of an automatic install that does all the job for you, but you can always create the partitions yourself and define what size you wanna give to the swap partition and then define every mounting point.

 

[adam9c1]

I think something like this was similar with win95.
With a bare minimum ram it would install differently vs more ram.

 

[Psychj0e]

I think something like this was similar with win95.
With a bare minimum ram it would install differently vs more ram.

I had a similar problem, but in the end I bit the bullet and downloaded some more ram. Was worth the price, really can't believe how much faster it made my mac.