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Monday, January 18, 2010

Apple MacBook Pro: Maximum Memory Upgrade?

So its been several months and we're still waiting for some of our favorite applications to be Snow Leopard compatible.

There may be a whole lot of improvements in this new OS including the claim of better memory footprint or management but really the downside in my current experience is that other applications need more memory.

I've been struggling mightily now to get Outlook Entourage, Firefox, Flock, Safari, VMWare and Parallels to co-exist without having to hang my systems.

That is why I finally decided to bite the bullet and make my first hardware upgrade in 2010. And since I don't believe in doing half-baked improvements (do it all or don't do it at all!) it was only natural for me to do some digging to find how far to go. I have a late-2008 non-unibody MacBook Pro 17" which according to OWC (my first choice for memory know-how on the Mac) my machine can actually take 6GB instead of the recommended 4GB according to Apple.

Do we go NewEgg, Amazon, eBay, BestBuy, Fry's, WalMart or Apple? Having had success with the G.Skill brand on the HP MediaServer I chose to stick with it.

Did it work? Proof images attached.

Speed improvement? YES!

Happy? Not yet, all my apps as mentioned aren't yet fully ported. But this will do pig, this will do. (from Babe)


Now that I've got a spare 2pcs. of 1GB, what to do with them? Hmm ... I know, upgrade the wife's MacBook and make her happy.

Make myself extra happy by maxing out her RAM as well.

1 comment:

  1. The disclosed method enables the user to bring a system into maximum performance mode. The detection is automated such that the user need not be aware of the memory slot SPD addresses. For memory upgrades, the tool graphically indicates the most efficient path. Finally, to avoid confusion with dual memory channel systems, the disclosed method uses the PCI subsystem identification codes to identify the specific system, and then display a board graphic which identifies the memory slots for each channel.

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