[Nishiology]

I have been having this issue for some time now, and I was hoping some one could help me in the right direction. I just recently upgraded the RAM module in my MBPro, from 2GB to 4GB (I was hoping this would make my MBP to boot up faster than when I had 2GB), now it takes at least 40 - 45 seconds to boot up, as before with 2GB it booted up pretty fast. Things I have done to resolve or troubleshoot this issue at hand -

Removed items from login items from under "Accounts".
Performed a clear cache of various applications.
Cleared some documents and emptied some more space(I don't know how this helps).
Also did a PRAM reset during boot up.

All of the above have not fixed my issue, and I am looking for more suggestions on how to fix the memory issue.

If anyone has any suggestions I would like to know.

Do post suggestions.

Nishi

[mkerr64]

i think i have the same problem after going to 6gb from 2.
personally it really doesnt bother me that much because i mainly put the comp to sleep rather than shutdown

[mduell]

More memory generally isn't the suggested path to faster boot times, and I'm not sure why your boot time increased, but do you really reboot that often?

[macmad]

I'm pretty sure it does a memory test as part of the power on self test process, the more RAM, the longer this will take.

[Nishiology]

Thanks guys, for all the suggestions. It was just something I was thinking as why it took so long to boot up, moreover every discussion group I went to, no one had any solutions.

[Zee]

i heard its better if you use the same kinds of ram together... for instance all your ram sticks should be kingston or whatever. and also heard that a computer does check memory while booting... but didn't think itl take that long :-O

[P]

The RAM check is the part that happens when the grey Apple logo is visible, but before the spinning wheel has shown up underneath it. It is a significant part of the boot time even at 2 gigs, and yes expanding RAM does increase this time.

The thing about "same kinds of RAM" has a small basis in fact - if you want to use dual-channel RAM, you usually have to make sure that the chips are identical (I'm not sure if Intel's latest chipsets, 965M and on, change this. It seems they might). This identical means that they have to have the same number of identically sized physical chips on each DIMM. To make sure that you get that, you can buy a pack of matched DIMMs from one manufacturer, but otherwise the manufacturer doesn't really matter.

[Arkham_c]

The other thing you should do is test the RAM to make sure it is good.

How to Test RAM Under Mac OS X | Command-Tab

That site describes how to test the memory using the built-in memtest tool.