Image Source: chetansurpur.com I’ve got a 17-inch, mid 2009 MacBook Pro; have had it for a bit over a year.  It came with 4GB of RAM and is a heck of a great laptop. Over recent months though, I’ve seen more and more times where it seemed stretched to at or near its performance limit. […]
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Beep Beep – My MacBook Pro is Zooming After Upgrading to 8GB of RAM

Dec 8th 2010 by

roadrunner

Image Source: chetansurpur.com

I’ve got a 17-inch, mid 2009 MacBook Pro; have had it for a bit over a year.  It came with 4GB of RAM and is a heck of a great laptop. Over recent months though, I’ve seen more and more times where it seemed stretched to at or near its performance limit. Times where there was noticeable, and often even severe, slowdown or lag in all my apps. Where overall performance was awful.

Yesterday I upgraded the MBP’s RAM from 4GB to 8GB. Zoom, zoom, zoom – was and is my impression of things after the upgrade. My MacBook is a much, much happier camper. Launching apps, switching between apps, doing anything within apps – all much faster. It feels like a blazing fast laptop again.

Here’s what I’m currently running, and what I pretty much always have running on a typical day:

— Chrome browser with 20 tabs open

— Mail app

— A Windows 7 virtual machine via Parallels Desktop

— Evernote

— Things

— Tweetie

— iTunes

And I’ve got over 2.5GB of free memory – and of course a happy and blazing fast laptop, which makes me a super-happy camper.

Just in case you’re contemplating a similar upgrade sometime soon, I’ll share some (hopefully) helpful details on how I got mine done …

I bought the 8GB upgrade kit from OWC (Other World Computing) for $120. The Apple price for the equivalent upgrade would be $600 – so a huge savings. I’ve used OWC in the past for memory upgrades on other MacBooks, following Brandon’s suggestion to give them a look – and I’ve always been very happy with their prices, on-time delivery, and helpful setup guides. Here’s their page for MacBook and MacBook Pro upgrades:

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Apple_MacBook_MacBook_Pro/Upgrade/DDR3

*** One key thing to keep in mind when you swap out Apple RAM chips and replace them with 3rd party memory (which is what you’re doing with the upgrade kit) is that you must keep the old RAM around, somewhere safe and where you can easily find it. Reason being that Apple geniuses / support will not give you the time of day with any system issue if they spot non-Apple memory in your machine – and they will spot it.

Generally, the OWC setup guides are very good, with clear photos and step by step instructions – so you should be good to go with those. You’ll probably need to have some tiny screwdrivers around to get back plate screws off with most laptop models.

This time around – with my 8GB upgrade – the OWC setup guide was wrong. It showed a different model of laptop than mine. So I just went to the excellent iFixit site and used the appropriate guide for my MBP model.

iFixit has a superb set of repair guides covering memory upgrades for Macs – and models from Powerbooks to MacBook Pros, iMacs and Mac Minis. They are clear step-by-step guides with big photos of what you’re working with. Check them out here:

http://www.ifixit.com/Browse/Mac

I am over the moon with my 8GB upgrade and my screamingly fast MBP. Hope your MacBooks are blazing along well too.

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