[markw10]

My fiancee is buying a imac shortly and wants to upgrade it to the full 2 gigs. What type of memory/brand should we look for? I have heard it's cheaper to do it on my own than have Apple do it and as well it's very easy to do.
As well, I know there are supposed to be new mac minis around the corner. Are there new imacs as well coming out soon?

[Tuoder]

Which iMac do you have? Personally, I like Crucial and Corsair RAM. RAM is usually very easy to install, if it is easy to get to. RAM is easy to get to on all iMacs. There are rumors about Merom shipping soon. The iMac and Mac Mini may move to Merom, although I consider more likely that the Mac Mini will just see a speed bump.

[parsec_kadets]

Some sites, like Crucial.com, will ask you what kind of computer you have and then tell you what type of ram you need. Crucial costs more than other sites, but I've never had a problem with their memory. The one time I bought from another site the memory went bad within two years.

As for installing it, that's a very easy task. Take a look at your user manual, if you still have it. All you'll need is a screwdriver. If you don't have your user manual any more, you can find it on Apple's website under support.

[markw10]

We're going to likely get the 17" version of the imac. We were holding off since there was talk of a possible upgrade of the imac within the next month or so.

[fgiwa]

I didn't realize that ram quality was such a important factor and so I just installed pretty cheap memory that I bought from upgradememory.com. So far things seem to be working fine. Is this memory doomed to fail on me? How will I know if its not working well?

[parsec_kadets]

No, it's not doomed. I'm sure the majority of people who buy cheaper ram are happy customers and don'e have any problems. However, the failure rate is higher. In the end I made a personal decision that I would rather spend a few extra dollars now and have the peace of mind knowing nothing will happen, rather than saving a few dollars today and possibly having to buy another stick in the future.

As for how you'll be able to tell, first there isn't really such a thing as RAM not working well or not so well. It's either just fine, or just bad. If your RAM goes bad your system will likely crash every time it tries to access the bad portion of memory (most of the time only a very small portion of the memory stick goes bad, not the entire thing). Because it only crashes when accessing a certain part of memory, it may seem like your computer is crashing randomly, or every time you launch a certain memory intensive app. For me it was World of Warcraft. When this happens, removing the bad RAM will solve the problem.

[KeriVit]

So, does the iMac take DDR or DDR2?

[Chinasaur]

Originally Posted by parsec_kadets

No, it's not doomed. I'm sure the majority of people who buy cheaper ram are happy customers and don'e have any problems. However, the failure rate is higher.

I challenge this Are you working off anecdotal information or do you have some stats to back it up? Yes, some people may encounter issues. This is most likely the same percentage that would have encountered issues with G5's.

In G5 days, RAM compatibility was an issue. With Intel, it's less of an issue.

Crucial is still playing the "mac tax for compat" card and people are still buying it.

Don't be fooled.

[parsec_kadets]

No, I haven't done any kind of study of my own. Just personal experience from before and after switching to Mac hardware. In my PC days I only bought Crucial memroy as well. I've never known anyone who had Crical memory fail. However, I recognize that this doesn't mean Crucial is the only good memory out there. It just happens to be one that I KNOW is good, and I've never seen anyone disagree. I guess the overall lesson is that when buying memory you need to consider it's source. Buy memory from a source you know and trust.