RAM it up!
Sometimes it’s embarrassing to admit the obvious, but I’m going to share this anyway for other Mac photographers like myself who are slow to get a clue.
I finally got around to adding four gigabytes of RAM (making a total of six) to my Mac Pro this morning. And damn it sure has made an epic difference in performance. I knew I needed more RAM/memory, but I kept thinking 2gigs should be sufficient, not realizing that the more I opened up and used memory hungry applications like Photoshop and Aperture –while running several other smaller applications in the background–the slower my computer navigation would be.
No matter what I tried to, including restarting the computer and larger applications, I kept getting the spinning beach ball of death every time I switched between applications. So having tried other ideas, I drove out to Fry’s Electronics and ended up purchasing 4 gigs of RAM, on sale for $159.00. The price was good and it matched what I had researched on the net. In fact, I had intended only purchasing 2gigs, but they only had 4gig kits. So that was even better.
Still trying to understand the role RAM plays in computer performance, I did a little more research before writing this. I came across a 2006 Macworld article titled “Upgrading RAM: FAQs: the ultimate Mac tuneup”. The article explains how to use the Activity monitor in your utilities folder to help find out if you need more RAM.
Another very handy resource, which I found a couple of weeks ago, is “99 Speed Tips for a Fast Performing Mac.” Rather you do a RAM upgrade or not, these tips will help de-clutter your Mac and increase speed. But again, nothing seems work like adding as much RAM as you can to your computer. Over the next year I’m going to try to increase my RAM to the total of 16GB simply because in the long run I think it will provide a significant production boost that will save me time and money overall.
Finally before I close, I also want to recommend a little application called Mactracker, which I found out about from the Macworld article referenced above. This is freeware application is great. It gives you all the information you will need about your Mac computer. And it provides detailed information about every Mac computer ever made.
Mactracker can help you figure out how much RAM your Mac model can take, especially if you’ve lost the paper documents that came with it. You can also click on the Apple icon in the upper left corner of your Mac to quickly find out about how much RAM you already have installed.
Well, it took me a while to realize the obvious, but as the saying goes, it’s better late than never.
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