Does increasing RAM affect battery performance?

I'm far from smart when it comes to computers, so lets get that out of the way. However i am glad to know i'm not the only one with similar battery life problems. I was suffering from my MBP freezing up, partly from nearly full harddrive, and partly from old battery. I replaced the battery and immediately noticed improved performance. no more freezing. Shortly after, i too decided to increase my RAM from the 4GB to 16GB since i would be running some music software and using my MBP as an interface between my piano keyboards/synths/drum kits, etc, and some video editing stuff. And as i'm reading the post, i too have experienced a dramatic reduction in battery life. approximately an hour from a fully charged brand new battery. I removed all other music/video editing programs, but still see no battery life improvement. I attempted several SMC resets, but nothing seems to work. I'm considering reducing the RAM to 8 GB, if not back to the 4GB from production. Any thoughts from the pros? Oh, and i apologize as i do not know how to simply add to this thread without responding to a single user, sorry rtmitchell.

Adding RAM means the computer uses more power and battery life will decrease by some amount. RAM draws power all the time but more when it's being accessed for read or write actions. You are correct that you are not a computer genius.

Sure, you'll use more power...more RAM to power, however the RAM itself will have minimal affect. What you're doing is the biggest battery drain.

RAM is one of the more efficient consumers of power in your MBP compared to other components. There can be power offsets when using certain applications such as a reduction of the number of times that the HDD has to be accessed. The net result can actually be a positive gain on battery life though these situations are relatively rare for the average user. Though I might question the need for 16 GB of RAM in a MBP, my feeling that the additional electrical consumption will be minimal.

Ciao.

A charge life change from 5-6 hours to 1 hour when going from 4 to 16 GB of ram is not reasonable...there is something else going on here. The increase in ram does draw a little more energy, but it will not be measurable for the average user unless you are doing very memory intensive work that is using all that memory. All you are doing is maintaining a charge level on the silicon which is miniscule under most conditions. Even for 16 GB of memory.

Your friend really needs to talk about what else is being done differently...using heavy duty software, multiple programs, video, anything that is memory and especially cpu intensive.

I would agree, very few users are going to need or be able to make use of 16 GB of memory...it will just sit there idle unless you run the kind of software that needs that kind of memory...or you run multiple programs at once that can all stay memory-resident at the same time.

I guess your area is not humor, since you failed to understand the remark in the context of your own words. What is your area of expertise? You didn't mention that.

I have a Mid 2010 MacBook Pro with a 250GB hard drive that is almost 80% full. The "genius" told me the excruciatingly slow downs were due to a too full hard drive, but didn't mention memory. I remembered later that I had never upgraded from the original 4GB RAM. This is the only computer around that era that will take 16GB RAM, so I decided to max it out three days ago. Performance has increased dramatically, but battery life has halved. The original battery was giving me about seven hours, now only about three or four. Right this minute the only open apps are Safari and the activity monitor, and my total memory usage is 6.76GB. The top three users of memory are

Parent process of kernal task is kernal task (0), parent process of MediaLib and IconSvc is launchd (1). Note, those three together use more than one-third of the original 4GB RAM. The hard drive was constantly being used for virtual RAM until I upgraded. Try opening iMovie under those consitions and you will see a lot of spinning lollipop. I would hardly call opening Safari and iMovie together overusage. I think anyone should upgrade and to the maximum, but I think it will definitely affect battery life. And kappy, i kind of wonder if rtmitchell's field is communication or human relations, since rtmitchell was so courteous and clever. Don't know. I am no computer genius eiher. Don't need an answer, just want to let everyone know my own experience with RAM draining battery. Hope you'll be nice if you answer.