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Semstudent · Nov 6, 2006, 04:43 PM

Greetings all,
I have been happily playing with my new toy, but have a concern. It came with 1 gig of ram, which is what I had in my PowerBook for as long as I owned it, I thought "1 gig should be plenty for what I do" but maybe it's not?

I'm experiencing lag, delay in moving the cursor using the trackpad, rainbow ball syndrome on occasion, and a general feeling of sluggishness. I opened Activity Monitor at one point (I only had Word, Safari, and iChat running) and noted that a full 1/2 of the available ram was occupied. I restarted, opened similar apps, about the same result.

This "seems" like a machine crying for more RAM, and I plan to upgrade, but how much is enough? Can I add 1 gig and be happy for life? In reading the RAM forum sticky, I found places where I can get that for under $100.

Is my diagnosis accurate? Opinions are invited and appreciated.

slpdLoad · Nov 6, 2006, 04:57 PM

It's probably accurate. Running things like Word, which have to run under Rosetta, use a huge amount of RAM, i.e. you'll need more RAM in an Intel machine than in a PPC for good performance.
Also look at how full your HD is. Trying to leave at least 10% of the drive's capacity free will help things.

Semstudent · Nov 6, 2006, 05:16 PM

Thanks! Lots of room left on the 160 gig HD..... is the increased appetite for RAM in Intel machines due just to Rosetta, or are there other reasons?

ibook_steve · Nov 6, 2006, 05:48 PM

Mainly Rosetta.

Steve

indigoimac · Nov 6, 2006, 07:13 PM

Ya, RAM consumption seems to mostly be because of Rosetta and perhaps some bloatation in the x86 version but I would expect most of this to be resolved in 10.5, I'm personally holding off until that comes out before I go and blow $600+ on 3GB of RAM for my iMac just because sometimes it feels a little sluggish, thogh as I've said many times it's a vast improvement over the PowerBook w/ the same amount of Ram in the sig.

mduell · Nov 6, 2006, 08:13 PM

Only half the memory used seems unusually low... OSX usually fills it up with disk/system cache.

slpdLoad · Nov 6, 2006, 08:15 PM

How much Virtual Memory does Activity Monitor say you're using, during normal use?

rickray · Nov 6, 2006, 08:20 PM

Perhaps your computer is still indexing data you transferred to it. That takes a bit of time usually. How long have you had it?

SierraDragon · Nov 6, 2006, 08:59 PM

Originally Posted by Semstudent

...Can I add 1 gig and be happy for life?

One GB RAM in a MBP is lame; two GB RAM will serve adequately for most, but not all, apps. Three GB is so expensive now you probably should just add the 1 GB DIMM.

- - Unless you will be professionally using Photoshop or Aperture, in which case you should have ordered the MBP with 3 GB from Apple.

Originally Posted by Semstudent

...I found places where I can get that for under $100.

Cheap RAM is false economy. Pay $127 for 1 GB from OWC.

-Allen Wicks

SierraDragon · Nov 6, 2006, 09:04 PM

Originally Posted by Semstudent

...is the increased appetite for RAM in Intel machines due just to Rosetta, or are there other reasons?

Not just Rosetta. Personal computers have been evolving to greater RAM usage since 1984, and the new true 64 bit hardware will help accelerate that trend. Already today Aperture on a Mac Pro uses 2.3 GB of RAM with only (native) Aperture and the OS running.

-Allen Wicks

Rev-O · Nov 7, 2006, 10:24 AM

Originally Posted by SierraDragon

One GB RAM in a MBP is lame; two GB RAM will serve adequately for most, but not all, apps. Three GB is so expensive now you probably should just add the 1 GB DIMM.

- - Unless you will be professionally using Photoshop or Aperture, in which case you should have ordered the MBP with 3 GB from Apple.
-Allen Wicks

Not much to add to this except that checking ram pricing before ordering my C2D MBP, Apple's price for the extra gig of ram (from 2gb to 3 gb) really wasn't that bad. Shopping around online (briefly, admittedly) I found prices for a 2gb stick ranging from $450 to $1000, where as from Apple (at govvie discount) it set me back $529. Yes, I could have ordered a 2 gb stick and sold the spare 1 gb stick to recoup some expenses, but it was worth it to me just to have it shipped with 3gb from the get go.

Semstudent · Nov 7, 2006, 02:35 PM

Originally Posted by slpdLoad

How much Virtual Memory does Activity Monitor say you're using, during normal use?

Virtual memory shows as 5.5 gb, but today the "free" ram is only 185 mb, I guess that speaks to what mduell said. I am going to begin the hunt for the best value ina 1 gig increase (I'd love to go to 3 gigs, but that's not in my financial future at this time, hehe). Thank you everyone for your input!