[goalstone]

I'm a newbie to the universe of personal computing. Recently I purchased a 17" 1.33 Ghz pb with a 20" Cinema display and absolutely love it!

I use it primarily as a word processor for work and school, e-mail, surfing the web, watching DVD's, storing music and digital pictures from my rad EOS Canon.

I want to use Adobe Photoshop, "when I can afford it" and play occaisional games.

My question is; What's the benefit of adding more memory? Im thinking of adding a stick of 512 ram to boost my total up to a full gig. Is it worth the $300? How will it improve performance?

Right now my pb runs great. Will more memory make it even better?

If someone could explain in layman terms the benefit of more ram it would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[bamchum]

Well, one thing you may not have noticed is that your machine probably shipped with 2 separate 256MB sticks. So if you buy a 512MB, you'll only be able to upgrade to 768MB at best. You could buy a 1GB stick, but they are inordinately expensive at present.

As for your question: with 512MB of RAM or less, the main thing you'll notice is slowness and a lot of hard drive chatter as the machine swaps data in and out of the "virtual memory" it stores on the hard drive.

After returning some defective memory, I recently and temporarily have had to work with just 512MB on my 15" aluminum powerbook. I find it pretty annoying: every once in a while it bogs down while swapping pages of memory in and out.

I'd say 768MB is the minimum acceptable configuration for my machine (and yours).

[bamchum]

Oh, and if you're using Photoshop, the more memory the better.

[xylon]

I'd definitely recommend picking up som RAM. I believe the prices as of now are relatively low, but I haven't been keeping an eye on them for a while.

Popping more RAM into your computer will render a noticeable difference, especially if you're using heavy programs like Photoshop. Just in general, you system will feel a little bit quicker, and that's always a good thing.

On a side note, what EOS did you pick up? I'm looking at some SLRs and want to hear what people have to say.

[goalstone]

xylon,
I have an EOS Rebel 300D: For the money it is an incredible camera. Truly a "prosummer" model.

[Aluminum]

I had 512 in my 15" when I received it stock and it seemed to do the job just fine for word, safari, mail, ical, stickies, and a few other apps. I did however go and upgrade to 1 gig though, just cause it just sounds good doesnt it

[acadian]

Actually, the Rev B 17"ship with a single 512 stick in it, making the upgrade to a gig simpler and cheaper.

[goalstone]

Can someone be a little more specific on the actual performance differences of 512 vs 1g of ram?

Thanks