Macbook Pro 4gb Ram Upgrade

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slappynutz

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Jan 30, 2007
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I have the upper-version Macbook Pro coming in the mail, and I'm seriously considering upgrading to 4gb of ram. Been looking at newegg and am a little confused. Hope you guys can help.

I'm going to be running Parallels and Bootcamp/Vista a lot, and figure I'll need the extra ram. I'm just used to working with 4gb of ram in Photoshop, so I've already decided.

Here's the tricky part.

At newegg there are essentally two choices. GeIL, and OCZ.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820144066

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227247

I have OCZ in my desktop and have never had any problems, but the GeIL has a rebate and some fancy-dancy heatspreaders, which makes it cheaper than the OCZ.

Further complicating things, the OCZ is listed as PC5400, and the GeIL is listed as PC5300. Plus the GeIL website is loaded with spelling mistakes. That turns me off.

There are also PC6400 (800mhz) versions available. They are available for a small premium and might be a good idea to get should I upgrade to a Macbook or other laptop that supports 800mhz ram in the future.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'm leaning towards OCZ but just wondering what you think. Thanks.
 
it wont fit with the heatspreaders, they are apparently easy to remove though

note: i only know this because I was looking into doing this myself, not from actual experience.
 
Use it with 2GB first and see if your needs justify 4GB. I have mine at 2GB and it's only when I use VMWare that I actually would make use of more than that.

EDIT: The machine I used for editing at school was an iMac with 3GB of RAM, and there's no obvious difference in Photoshop between the two, even with the large images from my digital camera.

If you want to upgrade something that will give you a massive, obvious performance boost, go for a 7200RPM HDD (if you haven't already). I just did the upgrade last weekend and the boost has been insane. Everything loads faster, not just stuff that uses a lot of RAM.
 
Thanks for the replies guys.

I do most definitely need 4gb ... I'm an art director so the kinds of files I'm using are often quite a bit larger than anything you could take on a consumer camera. Plus I've heard Parallels eats up tons of ram.

I bought the laptop with the stock 160gb 5400hdd, and I know stepping up to 7200 will make a big difference but I'm going to wait on the 320gb laptop drives coming out in a few months.

Read that about the heatspreaders, but another review on Newegg says he didn't have to remove them. Leaning towards OCZ anyway.

Just to be sure, because I can't tell on Apple.com, but getting 800mhz ram makes no difference at all on the current laptop, correct? The extra $30 would just be to make the ram more attractive should I upgrade to the inevitable new Macbook Pros sometime down the line.
 
Just to update, I finally got my new MacBook Pro last night. Waited 2 weeks for it to ship, and Fedex said it shipped straight from China. That should have tipped me off right there.

It arrived, I excitedly opened it up, powered it on, and immediately noticed two stuck pixels in the middle of the screen. One could turn every color but blue, and wasn't a big deal, but the other was stuck red and neither an overnight test-flashing-pattern nor rubbing could get it to work.

After about 30 minutes of charging, the laptop got scalding hot across the entire bottom. So hot I couldn't keep my hand on it for more than 10 seconds. Much hotter than any other laptop I've ever used.

Plus, it refused to boot and stayed at a grey screen randomly last night.

Needless to say, I've got an Apple RMA. Really bad first experience with Apple. Jumped the gun and bought 4gb of ram in anticipation that I'm now stuck with. Really, really wish Apple had a no-dead-or-stuck-pixel guarantee like Asus. If I didn't need the flexibility of both OSX and Windows I'd give up, but I'm going to see if I can get one used that I can check beforehand.
 
Apple doesn't have a specific dead pixel policy, but you can pretty much return it for any reason and get a new one. So if you've got deaddies, swap it out.
 
They do have a dead pixel policy, they only replace if it is over 7 pixels.
I know because earlier this year my macbook pro developed an entire horizontal row of dead pixels in the top third of the screen. When I called apple support the guy asked me how many dead/stuck pixels I had because they only repair if it is over 7 pixels. I told him 1440 were dead and immediately got a case number and I took it into a local repair center and had it back with a new screen within the week.
 
that's precisely the problem ... conflicting stories about their policies.

went into the 5th avenue apple store in nyc this afternoon to return the 30gb ipod i bought with the student deal online, and had the counter clerk say they replace even 1 dead pixel, a "genius" say it had to be 5, and a floor guy say it had to be 3.

either way the pixel issues were indepentant of the overheating and failing-to-boot issues.

guess i'm just unlucky with macs. i'd buy another if i could find someplace i could get a new model i'm guaranteed to have work 100%. shame that means apple loses my business as I can only do that by buying used.
 
offically, apple does have a stuck/dead pixel policy- they don't publish or advertise it anywhere.

slappynutz (heh)- as far as you're concerned, apple's customer service philosophy should override the pixel policy in that apple retail should do whatever it takes, within reason, to make you a happy customer. If someone isn't giving the customer service you feel you deserve, ask for the manager and go from there.
 
As someone said before, the memory won't fit with the heatspreaders. I would get the OCZ memory, I don't see the point in mailing in the rebate just to end up with $10 cheaper memory and having to take off the heatspreaders.
 
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