4GB in My MacBook Seems to be Working

Nearly a year ago, James and I invested in new MacBooks. We ordered the first 13-inch unibody models last November. In typical fashion, we didn’t buy memory upgrades direct from Apple, which traditionally have been relatively more expensive than third-party options. James immediately ordered 4GB of RAM, while I opted to wait. Well, we all know how that worked out for him — his MacBook would freeze up at various times, making it a very unstable device. His hopes for a fix in a firmware upgrade were dashed. And he’s not the only one that had issues — dozens of owners with the same devices experienced similar instability. To say I’m glad I held off on the upgrade is an understatement.

But now that Snow Leopard is here, I decided to take the memory upgrade plunge. Apple never admitted to any memory issue in the past year (that I know of), so it didn’t say Snow Leopard would address the issue. However, with the operating system being largely revamped under the hood, I figured now was a good time to try for an upgrade.

I purchased a 4GB memory upgrade kit from OWC for $87 and it arrived a few days ago. The process to upgrade the memory took me all of five minutes — the removal of eight screws and the bottom cover of the MacBook exposes the two memory slots. A quick release of the two 1GB modules and swap with the two new 2GB sticks is all it takes. Although the original issue seemed to occur without rhyme or reason for James and others, I’ve been running on 4GB of memory without a single issue for about 30 hours over the past four days. Either I never had any issue or Snow Leopard’s memory support is tad better in a late-2008 device than Leopard offers. It’s difficult to define what the root cause of the original problem was, because it could be hardware- or firmware-specific and have nothing to do with the operating system. Put another way: if it was the OS, then the issue would be far more widespread.

So how’s the MacBook running with 4GB of memory? Stellar is the word that comes to mind in terms of a performance boost. I recently upgraded my version of Parallels Desktop for Mac from v2.5 to v4 so I could install Windows 7 Ultimate in a virtual machine. The overall experience with my original 2GB of memory was quite dismal. OS X was sluggish and Windows 7 wasn’t a thoroughbred either. With a double dose of RAM, both operating systems are jaunting around without breaking a sweat. And when I’m not running Windows 7, OS X is blazing fast — apps are opening up almost instantaneously and they maintain that speed throughout usage. All in all, I consider the upgrade to be well worth the price, regardless of what actually solved the initial problem.

James adds: When Kevin mentioned to me he was going to try the 4 GB upgrade now that Snow Leopard is here, it got me thinking about the whole situation I was confronted with prior to SL. Two days ago in true trooper fashion, I opened up my MacBook and put the same 4 GB of memory that would not work before. I can’t state for certain, but so far I have experienced no problems at all for over two days. The only difference in my system now that it’s working (knock on wood) and before when it failed is Snow Leopard.  I wonder if SL is handling 64-bit operations better than the previous version of OS X? That could explain problems addressing 4 GB of memory.

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