THANKS FOR THE MEMORY...

Our crack team of Mac Investigators here at YourMacStore decided to check out the limits of the memory capacity in both a Core Duo and a Core 2 Duo machine. Their preliminary findings (a nice way of saying what was shouted to me as there was a flash and some smoke in the warehouse) was that when inserting 3GB of memory (1GB+2GB) into a Core Duo MacBook Pro (in it’s cool black SeeThru case) was that there was no boot at all. No, not the Italian leather kind of boot…literally the computer wouldn’t start at all. However, if you use the 2GB module only, all is fine and it works. A good thing to know if one of your memory slots happens to go bad on you. Just drop in a 2GB memory chip and you’re still good to go.

Now how about a Mac mini with a Core 2 Duo upgrade? The crack team of Mac Investigators tested that as well, and while there was no smoke and flashes when they gave me the rundown, I could still smell sulfur in the air. Seriously though, we found that it’s the same exact thing as the Core Duo MacBook Pro. The 3GB support isn’t likely for this kind of setup, but for a newer generation of bridge chip that’s coming in the near future.

Macbooks with Core 2 Duo processors, meet Memory!

For those of you lucky folks out there who have a Macbook Pro with a Core 2 Duo processor, I’m sure you’re saying to yourselves, “I sure do wish I could add 2 more Gigs more memory to this awesome notebook…but it’s so expensive!” Well, not anymore. If you’re willing to do it yourself, you can save a little over $500 on that memory addition.

“What’s that Uncle Mike? Did you just say that I can get 2 additional Gigs of memory for my Macbook Pro? “

What? Why do you keep making me repeat myself? Sheesh, I’m not that old. Yes, you see the Apple online store quotes $575 to add 2GB of memory to a MacBook Pro, and that cost is WAY too high. If you were so inclined to do it yourself, you could just go and see this lovely entry, order it, and when you get it, just put it into your MacBook Pro yourself! That’s an INSANE amount of savings, at the cost of a little bit of your time to put it in.

Don’t forget that Apple officially announced maximum memory for the MacBook is 2GB, not 3GB. So some folks would think that you can’t use a 2GB module for it. But actually it just works fine.

Now all that goodness aside, there is a tricky part to this. Those models have 2 memory slots, but the maximum they can utilize is 3GB of memory (1GB + 2GB). Even if you use 2 pieces of 2GB memory, you can only use 3GB worth of that. As my WoW buddies would say “Teh suxxors.” But that’s not totally true. If you run those same modules as a pair, it’ll work as dual channel, and that’ll work faster by 2-5% in a MacBook Pro and iMac. MacBook is another case as Video memory is shared with main memory there. This makes Dual Channel highly recommended. Granted if you don’t focus on graphic performance, 2GB+1GB is just fine, but if you need graphic performance, a pair configuration is highly recommended.

Hey, you in the back there…you look a little confused. What? You’ve never put memory into your own computer? Well…that’s something you should learn how to do! I’ll talk to one of our nice techs and see if they can write something up for a new post later next week. While they’re doing that, and while I’m writing up the next post here, I’d like to pose a question to all of our readers out there, and I’ll post the answers in a later blog…

What kinds of things would you like to see covered here in the YourMacStore Blog? While we do know a lot about Macs and such…we don’t know everything that YOU want to know. So start by asking us some questions…any Mac-Related questions, and we’ll do our best to answer them. That’s all for now!

-Mike Leader