Is it worth upgrading..

rogan · 27 Oct 2013 at 22:12

I have a 4 year old, mid 2009 macbook pro unibody

2.26 c2d with 5gb (4+1) ram.

Recently having gotten an upgraded internet connection and finally having a desk again means im watching netflix and max quality (doesnt seem to be options to lower it) and also wtaching tv/films on my monitor while working on my macbook

its been jittery and laggy when doing either of these things while working/browsing the internet, so i've been thinking of getting another 4gb ram stick and an SSD, will this likely solve my problems? or is it more likely to be a CPU issue?

bloodiedathame · 27 Oct 2013 at 22:47

Those upgrades will help. I still run a 2008 MBP and it does the things you've mentioned just fine (it has 4GB RAM and an SSD).

KIA · 28 Oct 2013 at 13:12

What's the CPU & RAM utilisation like?

rogan · 28 Oct 2013 at 18:40

thanks blood

KIA, i max ram quite often. but cpu is hard to tell it jumps around too much

uniQ · 28 Oct 2013 at 19:04

In activity monitor are you using swap and/or paging out?

You will definitely notice the difference in those upgrades, but you may still find the CPU being the bottleneck.

rogan · 28 Oct 2013 at 19:16

Screen%20Shot%202013-10-28%20at%2019.13.58.png

?

uniQ · 28 Oct 2013 at 19:52

Yeah you'll definitely benefit from a RAM & SSD upgrade.

You basically have no RAM spare. Mavericks is trying to compress some of it to free it up for other resources and is also writing nearly 7GB of virtual memory to your hard drive. So the extra memory would decrease compression and virtual memory usage and the SSD would make the virtual memory access much faster.

rogan · 28 Oct 2013 at 19:53

boss cheers

Dredd · 28 Oct 2013 at 20:56

my view was the os used everything available ram wise? his looks like mine and noway i'm using 16gb

i've attached a screen grab

uniQ · 28 Oct 2013 at 21:56

Virtual Memory starts at whatever amount of RAM you have. Once you see compression happening and Virtual Memory growing you're out/running out of RAM.

Screen%20Shot%202013-10-28%20at%2021.55.16.png

Dredd · 28 Oct 2013 at 22:04

your saying i'm running out of memory with 16gb?

i can't see how, i'm not running that much only a few apps

uniQ · 28 Oct 2013 at 22:14

Based on your screenshot you're at times using up your available memory yes.

Apple said:
With OS X Mavericks, Compressed Memory allows your Mac to free up memory space when you need it most. As your Mac approaches maximum memory capacity, OS X automatically compresses data from inactive apps, making more memory available.

Once the memory is compressed, your Mac doesn’t have to waste time continually transferring data back and forth between memory and storage. So it.s able to get more done in less time.

rogan · 4 Nov 2013 at 21:16

Hello again

I have another Quick Q:

If i install an SSD into the system, will the OS X recovery still be there, I.e if i dont want to clone my drive, i Just want a fresh install?

Seeing as my laptops gone through so many full OS X updates and theres all sorts of crap thats lying around I figure it makes more sense to start a fresh

or do i need to download some sort of mavericks boot key?