Anyone try Mountain Lion with 2GB RAM?

I've installed it on my 2008 iMac that has 2gb of ram. It's neigh on unusable. Upgrade from crucial in the mail now! :)

Either upgrade the ram or don't bother is my advice, lion ran like a dream on it though.

I don't see why you want to run these newer versions of OS X on minimum RAM specs.

Every iteration of OS X has needed more CPU, GPU and RAM resources.

Apple's minimum RAM requirement is just that! The bare minimum for the OS to function.

It is by no means optimal. Generally/usually speaking OS X, by itself, needs at least 2 to 3 times this amount of RAM to run smoothly and reliably on its own.

What exactly are you using your iMac for?

If you are running an Internet browser with Adobe Flash to watch any type of streaming video, this alone will eat up lots of CPU, GPU and RAM resources, alone.

If you are multitasking by also accessing email at the same time and using the finder to look at files/data, 2 GBs of RAM is barely enough to accomplish these simple tasks.

Do you use iTunes?

Do you play music in the background with iTunes running and other apps also running?

This takes even more RAM to do this.

You say your iMac runs fine on the minimum RAM spec.

Fine is a relative term. You might be happier with the speed of your iMac if you add extra RAM

RAM is cheap enough these days to add to Macs.

You have a MacBook with an SSD installed. SSDs, while great, right now are not cost effective in terms of cost per GB.

If you can afford a MacBook with an SSD, you can't spring some extra cash to add RAM to your iMac to make its performance better?

Any one here can tell you that the more RAM, the better many things on your iMac will run and function.

You see, I really want to take advantage of iMessage, Versions, Dictation, and all the other improvements, but on the other hand I don't want to spend another $60 for 4GB of RAM. So I'm trying to get an idea of what to expect.

8G of Ram is about $55, methinks you are penny pinching a little more than you should. 2G is a minimum for everything since Snow Leopard, who wants to be at the minimum?

4G of Ram for $60?? they saw you coming.

Thanks for the report John! 🙂

Mid 2011 mac mini with 2g works well. I did notice that mirroring to appleTV lags slightly with HD video, so I am upgrading to 8g ($43 at amazon). My wife's mid 2012 mba mirrors better. She has 4g.

I just got a Mac Mini i5 with 2GB ram, it came with ML installed. The out of the box experrience was good, worked with my TV and all that. But once I ran a few programs it was laggy, the worst experrience I have had for a brand new computer in years, since in I got a windows 7 PC with 2GB (which I upgraded to 4GB). So within a day of getting the new machine I have bought 8GB of ram for the mini.

I would say that if your machine is running smoothly at the moment and you don't want to buy more ram then don't upgrade the OS.

Another point, I would recommend changing to an SSD, I have replaced a regular HDD with SSD and found it to be an awesome upgrade in a PC. I would recommend this for any machine where you dont have the machine full of video, photos or music, because small SSDs (128GB or less) are a reasonable price. Of course I think that you want to have 4GB RAM before you go SSD. I have a windows 7 PC core2duo with SSD and 2GB ram it seems to be 10x faster than when it had HDD.

Running Mountain Lion on a mid-2011 mac mini with 2GB of RAM here and it definitely struggles. Still, it's usable. I can even use FinalCut, never the most stable of programs even under the best of circumstances. Upgrading to 8GB today though. I just can't take it anymore. The program it struggles the most with is Microsoft Word (of course). Just really painful.

Just curious if I understood right what John had said, did you say your used Lion ok on your 2008 with 2gb ram without any trouble but just had trouble when you upgraded to Mountain Lion? I know that everyone says that I should just go ahead and get the ram upgraded but I am on a very VERY fixed budget right now and I am just trying to find out if I could get away with using at least Lion without getting more ram for now without having my system slow done to much.

Mac OS XP wrote:

I wouldn't recommend that. In general, Mountian Lion is a little easier on RAM than Lion is. So all you would be doing is paying more, getting less, and having a slower computer. I personally have decided to hold off on upgrading to Mountain Lion on the iMac with Snow Leopard and 2GB of RAM because I don't want to spend money on RAM right now (DDR2 is expensive, I mean $60 for 4GB!).

Where are you buying your Ram, 4G is $29, 8G is $49 at OWC

Mac OS XP wrote:

Crucial. For DDR2 Macs, 4GB costs $60 even at OWC. http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/iMac/Intel_Core_2_Duo_PC2-6400

I (mistakenly) assumed you were referring to your MBP, apologies.

Mac OS XP --

I have your same iMac, and it came with 2G. Last year, running Lion, I upped it with a 4G chip. The difference was amazing. Seriously wonderful. It was worth every penny, IMHO.