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+--- Thread: White MacBook 4GB to 6GB RAM - Noticeable difference? (/showthread.php?tid=135899)
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Re: White MacBook 4GB to 6GB RAM - Noticeable difference? - magicmikey - 05-07-2012
Wow, lots to think about.
While I've thought about purchasing a Mac Mini to get the boost in processing power, I'm not in a position to sell my MacBook. I do photography at locations and have to be able to download the photos from the CF cards to my MacBook while there.
I do want to keep shooting RAW. I photograph a lot of live entertainment events (I'm a professional magician for my full-time living) where the lighting changes rapidly and I need the extra latitude that RAW gives me. I also get better looking images when using high ISO from a RAW file. (I shoot at ISO 6400 regularly.) I may be able to tweak the high ISO JPG settings for my 7D but I haven't found that proper combination if it really is there.
Re: White MacBook 4GB to 6GB RAM - Noticeable difference? - sekker - 05-07-2012
Jimmypoo wrote:
DO IT.
Macbook Late 2007 / GMA 965 - x3100 STOPPED ALL BEACHBALLS IN SAFARI and application switching
the moment it was installed.
Will an SSD accomplish the same thing? Good question. Since my screen still burns bright, despite the fact
it is only a SATA I port (like yours) the potential to triple HD speed and virtual memory performance is
significant.
But nobody out there should be fooled into thinking that having virtual memory at 180MB/sec is going to
compare to and extra 2GB of RAM moving at micro-seconds.
JP, if you were having spinning beach balls in Safari with 4GB of RAM, there was something else hogging memory on your machine. I have used 4GB in a MBP for 5 years - that's not normal. I'm glad the extra RAM fixed it, but all it did was feed the system parasite (like a memory leak in Safari).
Re: White MacBook 4GB to 6GB RAM - Noticeable difference? - magicmikey - 05-09-2012
I decided to give the extra RAM a try. It's not too expensive an upgrade so I went ahead and ordered it. The SSD upgrade would have been lots more expensive.
I'll post my thoughts after I install it. (Should be here Thursday.)
Michael
Re: White MacBook 4GB to 6GB RAM - Noticeable difference? - magicmikey - 05-10-2012
Okay, I got the 4GB module today and installed it. Here's what I'm finding. My Mac is running noticeably faster and Photoshop is definitely running faster. I wanted to check to see how much RAM is allocated to Photoshop and found where I should be able to get another speed boost. I found that Photoshop was only recognizing 2100MB of RAM as being available. That's when I remembered that the Noiseware plugin is not 64-Bit compatible for Mac and that I have Photoshop running in 32-bit mode. (I use Noiseware a lot - I do a lot of low-light photography.)
I checkedd Imagenomic's website and they still don't have a Mac version of their plugin that works in 64-bit mode. (It's supposed to be ready soon.)
Since I know I have lots of free RAM right now, I went ahead and allocated all of the 2100MB of recognized RAM to Photoshop and that helped a lot. (Prior to this, only about 1150MB of RAM had been allocated to Photoshop.) I can see that Photoshop is running quite a bit faster and Adobe Camera Raw is working faster and smoother so it looks like the upgrade was worth it.
Thanks for the input.