Is 3 gigs of RAM necessary for my MBP?

[ndriver182]

I've got a 15" MBP I bought back in January and shortly thereafter upgraded with another 1GB stick of RAM. I was thinking about maxing out my system with 3 gigs, which would mean pulling out one of my 1GB sticks and dropping in a 2GB stick. Will that 3GB vs. 2GB be noticeable? I run Parallels on a daily basis while performing both tasks simultaneously and typically several apps open in OSX while running Paralels.

 

[benzslrpee]

assuming money isn't an issue here...i've never heard anyone complain about getting more RAM. so why not?

 

[ChrisA]

I've got a 15" MBP I bought back in January and shortly thereafter upgraded with another 1GB stick of RAM. ....

Have you looked at Activity Monitor? It will tell you how much memory is in use. If you look and there is a lot of free memory then adding more will not help much. But Mac OS X will try and make useof all the memory you give it so it's unlikely there will be much free. If nothing else it will usethe memory as a disk cache. A good indication that you can use more RAM is to look at the "page out" counter. Ideally this should remain zero but any low number is OK. Ignore the "page in" OS X uses this to load programs


2GB should be enough for light use. It depends on what you are running if you need more.

 

[aaronw1986]

It depends on how much RAM you allocate to teh virtual machine, but I would say it's worth it. I maxed out my MBP to 4 GB, if money isn't an issue, then I would say go for it for sure.

 

[ndriver182]

Well a couple of notes. As I'm writing this I'm running Parallels hand have Internet Explorer open (I only use it for web exchange for work... I hate IE...lol), iTunes in OSX, Mail in OSX and Firefox in OSX. My system memory monitor in the activity monitor says:

Wired: 1.32 GB
Active: 426.48 MB
Inactive: 244.25 MB
Used: 1.98 GB
Free: 25.41 MB
VM size: 11.18 GB
Page ins/outs: 1580657/162808

Whatever all that means.

Also, I'm pretty sure my system maxes out at 3gb, right? I don't have the latest MBP that came out a month or two ago.