ibook - 512 or 768mb of ram?

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ChaotycEnygma

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 1, 2003
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i just got my 12inch ibook and im wondering if i should get another stick of 256 or 512. will the ibook see that big of a difference if i get the 512 over the 256 or will i be fine with just a total of 512? tia
 
in my experience, regardless of mac or pc, the most ram you can afford is the right amount.

i.e. if you can afford a 1 GB so-dimm that works with ibooks buy it
 
I would go for at least the 512. As i just have a Adium, iTunes and a browser open and i'm using about 280megs out of my 768. Think if you've got all those open and you wanna do something in photoshop or edit a video/audio, you'll need alot more ram.
Like was said before the more you can afford, thats the right amount. However i'm not sure i could justify spending the cash for a 1gb sodimm for my ibook.

however i did justify spending the cash on a 1gb module for my mini :D
 
I'd go for the 512 stick as osx likes ram and since you can't upgrade to more ram later on without pulling a stick you should put in the most that you can.
 
any other brands for laptop memory i can trust other than crucial, because i really dont want to spend 130 when i can spend 90 on the same amount of ram.
 
you get what you pay for so if you want to put generic crap in the comp go for it but if you had a Porche would you put generic O I L from the white bottle and black letters in it? I hope not....there isn't that much of a difference and trust me when I say you will be kicking yourself if/when you start having issues with random crashes or kernel panics
 
honestly, that is crap sometimes. im not talking about generic crap, im talking about something like mushkin. crucial is nice, but their 512 is very overpriced. why pay 40 more for the same thing? and if i had an expensive car like a porsche it probably wouldnt matter because those cars are mostly a waste of money anyway, so why not just waste so more. :D
 
ChaotycEnygma said:
any other brands for laptop memory i can trust other than crucial, because i really dont want to spend 130 when i can spend 90 on the same amount of ram.
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Simpletech

we used Simpletech in all our mac machines at my old job, we had no problems. CDW even shipped us "certified MAC memory"......it was simpletech.

Bought a 512mb simpletech chip for my ibook, haven't had 1 problem yet.
 
its ok to buy faster rated ddr ram right, because it seems like the pc3200 stuff is cheaper than the pc2100 stuff? the ram will just step it self down like it does in other machines, right?
 
Yea simpletech, kingston, cosair, crucial, samsung etc. Pretty much stay away from the off brands and you should be fine. Most faster ram will step down fine.
 
I got a stick of Kingston 512MB at BestBuy for 75 bucks after $20 MIR. Works fine in my 15"PB, and I plan on getting another stick next month.
 
sieb said:
I got a stick of Kingston 512MB at BestBuy for 75 bucks after $20 MIR. Works fine in my 15"PB, and I plan on getting another stick next month.
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how many slots do the PB's come with? 2?
 
Darth Bagel said:
is this to suggest that macs generally use more memory?
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Like liquidtrance said, it's more that Mac OS X puts the memory to bettter use than Windows does. Unused memory is wasted memory. Free RAM is not a good thing. OS X tries to use all of it, and that is a good thing.

And I'd say it generally needs a bit more memory than XP. Not a lot, though...
 
I got my iBook 12" last week. I ordered 768MB RAM because that's all I could afford. Since it's my first mac, I ordered everything BTO so I could start using it right away. I have a lot of applications open all the time: Mail, Safari, Finder, iPhoto, Adium, Address book, iCalendar etc. No noticeable slowdowns, even when switching to an application that has been minimized a long time ago.

About the memory usage: OSX likes lots of it and manages it much better than Windows. For example:
Start copying a Divx movie or something large.
Try to surf the forum while the copy is busy.

Windows will swap out all applications, including parts of the program you're actually using at the moment! The UI becomes sluggish and you have to wait a short eternity for screen redraws while the disk is trashes its guts out. It seems that Windows tries to enlarge its disk cache but at the same time takes memory away from the running applications.

On the other hand, on OSX, every application remains responsive. The disk cache doesn't grow to unreasonable size and there's enough memory left to keep everyone happy, including the user. ;)

Enjoy your iBook and just upgrade to the size you can afford. Both options (512/768) will bring you a noticeable performance upgrade since 256MB is cramped, even for a Windows box.
 
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