MacBook Pro Memory Problems?
Hello and thank you for reading this. I've just purchased a new 2010 MacBook Pro 15 inch Intel Core i5 running Mac OS X 10.7.4 Lion and upgraded the memory from 4GB to 8GB. After the upgrade, there is no difference in performance. Under "About This Mac" is says 8GB of memory, and when I click "More Info" it says 4GB in each slot (there are two of them). My dad's MacBook Pro (A 2011 17 inch with Intel Core i7 also with 8GB of memory) boots up in 3 seconds from chime to login screen. Mine takes 40 seconds. Even up to a minute at times! My computer has a 250Gb Hard Drive with only 60GB used. Sorry for typing a novel, but is this normal? I know an i7 is faster, but THAT MUCH?!?
Comments
Memory has little to do with boot times, neither does the CPU power -- boot time is determined by the speed of the hard drive and the amount of startup software that the machine is loading.
Your Dad's machine at 3 seconds means either 1) he has a SSD, not a hard drive as his boot drive, or 2) he isn't booting from shutdown, but just resuming from sleep.
Your hard drive may be extra slow for some reason. Do you have a bunch of things like Skype, Dropbox, and other software helpers or widgets that automatically load at boot time? Turn some of these off. Repair Permissions with Disk Utility, and reboot the machine holding down the Shift key to boot into Safe mode, which will also do a background disk repair as it boots.
More RAM will show performance increases mainly when you are multitasking lots of programs, or when you are using video or graphics production programs that use mega amounts of memory. More RAM will not show much of a performance difference if you are only using one program like a Web browser.
What does more RAM do?
http://www.computer-answers.ca/2011/computer-quest...