Macbook Pro 13" Upgrade Questions

[BigHurt88]

Hey guys,

I have a Macbook Pro that I purchased two summers ago. It's the 13" model and has 2GB of RAM and 160GB hard drive. It works fine however, in January I am taking a few night classes that require both Photoshop and Office. I can run both at the moment but the load times are a little slow. I was wondering if a boost in RAM would help speed this up? If so, how much should I get? I did some research on Apple's site and the model I have supports up to 8GB. Should I do the full 8GB or is 4GB sufficient? Thanks for your input.

[m1dget]

Well you should check for your ram usage in the first place. I was tempted to tell you that it's not worth putting extra ram in, but you are using some Microsoft and Adobe stuff so yeah, that might not be a bad idea after all. An additional 2GB might not be bad for loading and task switching time.

[BigHurt88]

Thanks, m1dget. Ram seems to be fairly affordable at the moment and I have my eyes on some Mushkin right now. So 4GB is enough? Would I see much performance increase if I went 8GB? Or do you think that would be overkill. I don't mind spending a little extra if I have to.

Cheers!

[Helix]

I would suggest going with 1 4GB SODIMM instead of 2x2GB. That'll let you upgrade in the future without having to rebuy capacity you already have.

[lowfat]

I think going w/ an SSD would be a much bigger improvement in performance. 2GB is plenty of fine for most applications.

[BigHurt88]

lowfat,

That is a great point. I think I'm going to wait for the Black Friday and Christmas sales and go with the 4GB RAM and SSD combo. I mean the mac is fine as is however, the load times for photoshop are a bit annoying.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone.

[yamawho]

I just upgraded my late 2009 Mini from 2GB to 4GB of ram and from 160GB 52000 RPM hdd to 640GB 7200 RPM last week. I haven't noticed much improvement so far but all I've been doing is xmas shopping on the web

Besides the huge increase in disk space, changing the ram was an after thought. I figured since I would be taking it apart, I might as well do it at the same time.