Any way to use more RAM on older MBP?

[M A V I C]

I've been using my MacBook Pro, C2D 2.33, 10.6.7, X1600... at work a lot lately. Unfortunately, using Photoshop, opening 500MB-1.5GB PDFs, running Win7 in a Fusion 3 VM with 1GB of RAM allocated... is a bit more than this thing can handle.

IIRC, this chipset was supposed to max out at 3.33GB of RAM but I was thinking that was per application. I have 4GB installed. Activity Monitor shows it has 3GB (About this Mac shows 4GB.)

I'm pretty sure the kernel is set to 32bit mode, but can run in 64bit mode. Would that help me be able to utilize more RAM?

Thanks

[C(-)ris]

Nope, The hardware can only address 3.3GB of ram. No way to get more.

[mattkime]

you're asking that thing to do waaay too much.

[sekker]

Put an SSD in it.

Or get the cheapest iMad

[M A V I C]

sekker wrote:
Put an SSD in it.

Or get the cheapest iMad

It had an SSD in it... wouldn't make a difference in this case. Has a very fast platter drive in it now.

[sekker]

M A V I C wrote:
[quote=sekker]
Put an SSD in it.

Or get the cheapest iMad

It had an SSD in it... wouldn't make a difference in this case. Has a very fast platter drive in it now.
Replace the optical with the built-in hard drive and install an SSD. Use the SSD for the VMware Fusion partition. You will see a significant speed increase running the virtual machine as it'll prevent Fusion from using the hard drive for RAM for windows.

The quality of the SSD will definitely matter when it comes to this kind of speed optimization, too.

But even a first gen i3 iMac will blow that machine away for this application.

[M A V I C]

sekker wrote:
[quote=M A V I C]
[quote=sekker]
Put an SSD in it.

Or get the cheapest iMad

It had an SSD in it... wouldn't make a difference in this case. Has a very fast platter drive in it now.
Replace the optical with the built-in hard drive and install an SSD. Use the SSD for the VMware Fusion partition. You will see a significant speed increase running the virtual machine as it'll prevent Fusion from using the hard drive for RAM for windows.

The quality of the SSD will definitely matter when it comes to this kind of speed optimization, too.

But even a first gen i3 iMac will blow that machine away for this application.
Well, for one I need the optical drive. Secondly, I'm not using the VM for much... just two tools that don't use a lot of RAM. VMWare just snagged 1GB of real as that's what's allocated.

Even with a good SSD and multiple drives to spread the data round, I still get the same sort of slowdowns on my tower when it would run out of RAM.

[decay]

sounds like you need a newer Macbook then.

[M A V I C]

decay wrote:
sounds like you need a newer Macbook then.

Sadly. Can't justify the expense though. Was hoping going 64bit would get me an extra 300MB at least.