Upgrade for more RAM

[Jonathan_Hill]

Hello everybody,

I am new to this discussion forum and I have to confess not a very technically inclined person hence the reason for me posting the below dilemma:

I have a 21.5 inch iMac that was purchased in 2012 but dates from mid 2011.

It has 4GB, 1333 MHz DDR3 and the processor is a 2,7 GHz Intel Core i5.

Until now it was running great but I recently upgraded the OS to High Sierra 10.13.4 but the problems began when I upgraded to Adobe CC for using programmes such as InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop for my wife's new Photoshop course.

I previously operated Adobe CS5 on Yoesmite and it worked fine but it seems my machine is running low on memory now and is running very slowly as these new applications are taking forever to open up, close and do most functions.

The machine is running and to do basic things like email, use word etc. its fine but when using the Adobe CC suite it's a real issue. I don't want to really fork out for a new machine just at the moment for another two years or so as it's generally a very good machine, so would anyone have any recommendations as to what I could do to:

A - Increase it's speed? Any suggestions for RAM, where to buy it and how to install it would be good.
B - Any other hardware I could buy to speed things up a bit?

I don't want to invest much more than 300-400EUR really so I'm aiming around that figure if at all possible.

Many thanks for any advice.
Jonathan Hill

 

[cwanja]

You can easily squeeze out another few years of this machine and breath some life into it. You are liking still using a spinning harddrive and could upgrade it to an SSD or use an external SSD as your boot drive. Although, you only have USB 2.0 ports available.

If you are comfortable opening the iMac, you could upgrade it. Or take it to a service center near you to upgrade the harddrive. I believe that users have mentioned issues with the OWC SSD drive kit I am about to link to, but search the forum to be sure. However, this is something you could look into.
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/imac-27-inch/2011

With regards to your RAM question, you can upgrade to 16GB (officially from Apple, 32GB from third party testing) and would suggest using OWC or Crucial for RAM.
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/memory-info

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/...num-mid-2011-thunderbolt-specs.html#macspecs2

 

[Jonathan_Hill]

You can easily squeeze out another few years of this machine and breath some life into it. You are liking still using a spinning harddrive and could upgrade it to an SSD or use an external SSD as your boot drive. Although, you only have USB 2.0 ports available.

If you are comfortable opening the iMac, you could upgrade it. Or take it to a service center near you to upgrade the harddrive. I believe that users have mentioned issues with the OWC SSD drive kit I am about to link to, but search the forum to be sure. However, this is something you could look into.
https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/imac-27-inch/2011

With regards to your RAM question, you can upgrade to 16GB (officially from Apple, 32GB from third party testing) and would suggest using OWC or Crucial for RAM.
http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/memory-info

https://everymac.com/systems/apple/...num-mid-2011-thunderbolt-specs.html#macspecs2

[doublepost=1536246274][/doublepost]Wow, super grateful for the advice given. This is excellent. I'm quite happy that I could still use the machine for a few more years before considering a serious upgrade which I know will be on the cards in 2/3 years.

I'll run the mac into my local Mac store to look at hardware update options.

Thanks again!