SR Macbook Pro 4gb vs 2gb RAM - much diff?

electric ant

electric ant

electric ant

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Hi
If you have upgraded your MBP to 4gb of ram how much faster in real terms is it?
also if you run photoshop, vmware fusion, handbrake etc is it much faster?
with 4gb ram kit being unde £100 im thinking i might treat myself for christmas :)
 
I recently upgrade my macbook pro to 4GB, generally it's a lot smoother but as for speed gains can't really give timings as I'm not a photoshop guy. At the current price of the ram though you'd be crazy not too take the plunge ;)
 
Depends if you are going to be using a lot of massive applications. I've no doubt 4GB is going to be a little faster than 2GB but you're getting much, much less bang for buck than moving from say 1GB to 2GB.

At the end of the day, if you think you would end up upgrading to 4GB at some point anyway you may as well do it now.
 
Moving my Macbook Pro from 2 to 4GB I saw smaller gains than when I put the now spare 2GB from my Pro into my Dad's Macbook. The difference on the standard Macbook was much more apparent moving from 1 to 2GB
 
A faster hard drive will be a better upgrade, but yes, 4GB is a nice performance boost when using CS3
 
Question is - I'm assuming it will take longer to sleep on lid closure.

I'm thinking that more open apps -> more memory used -> longer to sleep.
 
Don't forget that more memory = more battery usage so I'd be watching your RAM usage and based on that will determine if it's worth the upgrade :)

As soon as you start swapping the benefits will be apparent :)

Ah I how I miss my MacBook...:(

BeatMaster :D
 
I'd agree a 7200rpm hard drive is tempting but the hassle of opening up the MBP and the loss of warranty put me off somewhat. I also have a large external hard drive so space isn't a factor.
Has anyone had any experience of using vmware or parallels with 4gb of ram, I'm hoping it will be a bit speedier, sometimes I use photoshop in Mac OSX whilst working with files in windows too.
I think I'll probably take the plunge anyway and get 4gb as prices seem pretty good now to be honest.
 
I've run XP in a VM with 1GB RAM and it worked "okay". With four you should be fine.

Like you say, prices are pretty good and I'd class photoshop and virtual machines as heavy use so go for it. At the very least youre not going to be sat there thinking "this could be so much faster with more RAM."
 
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