Upgraded ram, will i notice much of a difference?

[surfologist87]

I have an early 2006 iMac 1.83 and it came with the stock 512mb RAM.
I just got another 512 for the second bay basically for free.

So now im running on 1gb... It wouldnt read at first but then i realized i was being too gentle with the thing and needed to shove it in deeper. (..haha..)

So, will i notice much of an improvement now? Honestly for being almost 5 years old, it doesnt run much slower than my brand new MacbookPro.. (bought it yesterday!!)
Or should i upgrade the iMac to 2gb to notice anything?

I didnt feel like dropping too much money into it because of the 12 lcd lines i have on the screen. But its still a good machine so I use it a lot.

Thoughts?

 

[r.j.s]

You will notice a huge difference with that extra RAM.

 

[surfologist87]

Awesome

I just did it 5 minutes ago and already I feel like it booted up faster..
I cant wait to give it a few days use and actually feel it.
Thanks for the reply

 

[TMRaven]

I remember having my original G5 iMac and upping its ram from 512mb to 1gb, and eventually 1gb to 2gb. The results were astonishing.

 

[surfologist87]

Thanks.
I got this brand new stick of 512 for the price of my gas going to get it.
Ill check the price of two 1gbs and see what happens

I cant believe it took me this long to do it.

 

[scoobydiesel]

RAM is always a welcomed update IMO.

 

[Tigerman82]

RAM is always a welcomed update IMO.

I have a new iMac (mid 2010). To be honest there is zero difference when it comes to basic use when going from 4 gigs to 8 gigs. I'm sure in games and Photoshop it's another matter, though.

Anyway, I concur. Nowadays 1 gig is too little. Put it this way, I bought a Mac Mini a little over a year ago and it had 2 gigs of RAM. Whenever I opened several applications, there was a noticeable slow-down. I bought 2 gigs more to the Mac Mini making the total 4 gigs. The difference in basic use was huge!

I think today 4 gigs is enough for basic use. If you use pro applications or play games, you can consider buying more RAM. I wouldn't buy more than 8 gigs total in any situation unless I was a serious photographer etc., though. Just like with choosing 27", I'm horrified how some fellow-forum members almost give the picture that what is actually an overkill is good. I know some of us get 16 gigs straight from Apple. However, I'm sure some of them are just basic users who have read that 16 gigs of RAM is really a minimum.

 

[scoobydiesel]

It matters what everyone is doing but i do agree i think 4Gigs is like the perfect amount for basic settings, You shouldnt see any slow down with surfing and listening to music and all that fun stuff.

But once you get into FCP or Pro Logic....Other things would be very happy to see more ram


My MBP is only running a 2GB :-/

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

To be able to tell, open Utilities, Activity Monitor. Click the System Memory tab.

Then do your usual thing and keep an eye on that info at the bottom of the panel. If you don't use up all available memory, you won't notice much difference when you add more. However, if you do use up all memory, then the virtual memory starts getting used. Virtual memory is dynamically loading/unloading from a buffer on the hard drive. That's fast, but MUCH SLOWER vs. using RAM instead of hard drive read/write speeds.

If everything you generally do never allocates more than the memory you have, you pretty much don't need additional memory. However, if you regularly are using more RAM than you have (thus virtual memory), adding RAM will speed up everything... a lot. RAM read/writes are wayyyyy faster than hard drive read/writes.

Also, don't automatically assume that if you don't use programs like those from Adobe that you don't need more RAM. Safari, for example, can really eat up a lot of RAM. Open it, browse around your favorite sites, and watch RAM get eaten in Activity Monitor.