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Upgraded Mac Book.Highly recommended for any laptop needing a boost in memory as it (combined with a new SSD drive) will take any old laptop and make it.
When your computer is running a bit slowly, how can you tell if getting more memory will help? If you run out of free memory then your computer will be forced to use some of your hard disk as memory, which is VERY SLOW because hard drives are much slower to access than your computer’s RAM. It’s not just a matter of saying ‘8 GB’ is enough because the amount of RAM you need will vary according to your Mac model and the programs you use. Here’s how to check if you have enough RAM.
How to check your Memory on a Mac With El Capitan Apple have introduced a very simple graph based on colours to let you know if you have enough RAM or not. Do this during the middle of using your computer for what you normally use it for. Don’t do this as soon as you start your computer as this won’t give a good indication of your normal usage. Better still, check it at various times over a few days. Go to your Applications/Utilities folder. (Click on your desktop so that the finder is active then hold down Apple-Shift-U, this will open your ‘utilities folder.).
Open ‘Activity Monitor’ – it will probably be the top-most application in the Utilities Folder. Press Apple-1 to make sure that the main window of Utility Monitor is open. Click on the ‘System Memory’ tab at the bottom of the window. This will display a little graph with the memory pressure. It will look something like this: If there is any red in the memory pressure you need more RAM. Red means your performance is taking a hit because your computer needs to use the disk drive for memory. If the memory pressure is green you have enough memory (like the screenshot above). If the memory pressure is yellow it may be worth monitoring over a few days to see if it goes into the red.
Checking your memory on older versions of Mac OS On older versions of Mac OS the display looks more like this: There are two important items to take note of ‘Free:’ and ‘Page outs:’ Free tells you how much free memory you currently have available to use – the higher the better. If you have no free memory you should get more RAM. A Page out means your computer has run out of memory and had to use some of the Hard Disk instead of RAM. (This is the equivalent of your brain being too full so you have to write your thoughts down on paper to free up some head space) This DRAMATICALLY slows down your computer. Tip: Page outs occur when your Mac has to write information from RAM to the hard drive (because RAM is full). Adding more RAM may reduce page outs. Some Examples.
This Mac definitely needs some more RAM! Practically no free memory AND High Page-out Count. (1GB!) Performance will be suffering badly. I would add at least another 4G Ram, maybe 8G more to bring it up to 12G. In OSX Leopard rather than giving a ‘count’ of page in and page outs, it gives a size in GB of the amount of RAM that has been paged in or out. The numbers are smaller but the same principles apply. In OSX Lion there is a new entry called ‘Swap Used’.
(See the last picture above). This is a count of how much Disk Space your computer is using as RAM and it’s a good rough estimate of the minimum amount of extra RAM you need. Eg If your Swap used is 4G then get AT LEAST 4G more RAM. Where to buy more RAM. You can’t buy any RAM. It needs to be Apple compatible.
It’s worth getting good quality RAM to avoid problems. Currently my 2 favourite places to buy RAM are. My Mac mini has 16GB of Crucial RAM in it at the moment. I’m in Australia and it usually arrives in about a week. OWC might be the better option if you live in the USA. Crucial They have a memory lookup tool for all computers where you choose your model and it shows you exactly what memory you need.
The memory chooser tool looks like this: First choose ‘Apple’ where it says ‘Choose Manufacturer’ Secondly select your mac when it says ‘select product line’ (e.g. IMac or Macbook etc) Finally select the exact model (e.g. Early 2011 i7 27″ iMac”) It will then show you the options you can buy. OWC – Macsales Another reliable source of good Mac RAM is Other World Computing, also called. Why RAM affects your computer’s speed.
RAM in your computer is like the paper sitting on your desk. The information is easy and fast to access. Your Hard Disk is more like a filing cabinet, it takes a bit longer to retrieve information. When your desk gets too cluttered you need to spend some time moving things in and out of the filing cabinet, which slows things down. You don’t need to be able to store everything in your computers memory, it’s good to have a hard disk, but if you don’t have enough memory then your computer will need to access your hard disk too much and this can slow things down.
To quote from Apple: Moving data from physical memory to disk is called paging out (or swapping out); moving data from disk to physical memory is called paging in (or swapping in) Extended periods of paging activity reduce performance significantly; such activity is sometimes called disk thrashing. I have a 2012 macbook and it is running fine.
The new iOS updates seem to cripple old iPhones by slowing them down, but in my experience the new OSX updates for computers don’t tend to hurt older machines. In fact sometimes there are improvements. The only exceptions are (1) make sure that you have enough RAM, and (2) some older software does not work after a new software update.
I had to recently update Filemaker Pro, Adobe Photoshop and Comic Life simple because the new OS X was not compatible with older versions.
You might have wondered how to get more RAM on your mac. You can replace it yourself, but you need to be careful where you buy it from. In case you haven’t yet realised, Apple Memory is different to normal PC RAM, so if you go to a cheap PC shop or ebay and buy some memory it probably won’t work in your Apple computer. Here’s a reliable place I have found to buy RAM that works well in your Macintosh.
It’s not that you need ‘Apple’ memory, but you do need high quality RAM with certain specifications that are not obvious so you need to buy from someone who knows the differences. You can buy RAM that is the right speed (eg 667 MhZ DDR2 FB-DIMM etc) but it still won’t work. If you can recommend a good reliable MAC RAM supplier leave the details in a comment below!
After much trial I have found a very reliable source of Mac RAM to be ‘Crucial’. (Crucial is the name of the shop!) Check them out at They even have a little program that you can download and it works out what computer you have and then pops you onto their webpage on the page showing the memory you need to buy! Their prices are very good too.
The other place I’d suggest to buy RAM from is. Last month I was upgraded my RAM and SSD in my new macbook pro and I ordered the RAM from OWC and the SSD from Crucial. They are both were reliable brands. Purchased 2x8gb crucialmajor faults started within daysrepair by Apple techs took time, and by the time both had been replacedbeyond 45 days. “Too bad so sad” from crucial.
Beyond 45 days all they will do is replace with the same – which I had apple replace. Pathetic customer service. Stay away from Crucial brandpay the couple of extra $ and get real quality. I did not want a refund, rather a credit to get “something else”. Save yourself the hassle I have hadand yes, Apple installed Samsung.
I’ve been dealing with Crucial, without issues, for 15+ years. I recently bought some memory for my Mac Mini and it is not very heat tolerant. I bought it in December and didn’t have a problem until things started warming up. It took me a while to figure out why my Mac was crashing multiple times per day. I finally took the Crucial memory out and put the original Apple memory back in (4GB – Ugh).
Didn’t have any other issues. I sent the 16GB modules back to Crucial and they replaced them about 2 weeks later, free of charge.
No crashes at all with the original Apple memory. I put the new Crucial memory modules back in and it immediately started crashing again. I called and they worked me through the standard process before saying, “You’ll need to call level 2 support during business hours at this point.” I never did. I figure that, at best, they’ll just send me more modules that can’t take the heat of a Mini. I’m just going to either try OWC or Apple. Apple will be more expensive (by quite a bit) but I very likely won’t have to deal with random crashes.