how much RAM is recommended to run mountain lion?

In all technicality, 2GB is enough for Mountain Lion, 32GB is overkill...

So get a Solid state disk and 8GB of RAM, you will have to hang onto your seat on how fast your computer will become! 😉

I recommend Other World Computing for your Mac upgrades.

I don't see a 2008 MBP with 2.2 Ghz, (only 2.4 Ghz or better) the Late 2007 meets your spec's of 2.2GHz, so perhaps you have a MacBook Pro 3,1 instead of a MacBook Pro 4,1.

The MacBook Pro 3,1 (Late 2007) was sold into Febuary 2008, so perhaps you didn't purchase what you expected.

You can find out, do a Apple menu > About This Mac > More information for a model identifier.

People recommend 4GB for the Lions, despite the 2GB Apple says it minimal needs.

However if your running bloatedware Chrome and Photoshop, you certainly could use more RAM.

The Late 2007 (3,1) it's possible to swtich out one of the 2GB's and put a 4GB module in, so you have 6GB total, same with the 4,1 and the Late 2008 (5,1) can hold 8GB. (2 x 4GB)

Until I know your model identifier I won't know for sure what to recommend.

Your problem isn't 100% RAM amount but it's slow speed, your older Intel Core 2 Duo + Mountain Lion bloatness + newer program bloatness.

It also could be you have been moving the computer around while the hard drive is spining, this causes the platters to become damaged and the sectors harder to read from which causes the beachballing to occur as well.

This can be fixed, but it will require you copying off all your data to a external storage drive (do not use TimeMachine or clones to restore here), the booting into RecoveryHD and using Disk Utiltiy to 3x overwrite erase your MacintoshHD parttition (takes a long time to finish) then reinstalling OS X, your programs from original sources and then finally your files from backup.

Reset your Mac

If you had any software issues, those obviously would be resolved also, unless you installed programs that were not ideal or compatible, like third party anti-virus (unneded) or the trashware called Mackeeper (avoid!)

If you go this route, take your time installing software until you see a performance issue, then that's likely a problem.

Chrome is bloatware attempting to use the browser to do everything, spawning a zillion seperate processes for each tab and eating memory like candy, avoid it and use the much faster Firefox instead.

Photoshop you can't help, but what you can do is allow it to have as much RAM as possible by not running other programs at the same time. The ability of the Lions to restart programs/windows from the last session should be avoided.

Why is my computer slow?

https://discussions.apple.com/community/notebooks/macbook_pro?view=documents#/

get a Solid state disk

The Late 2007 and Early 2008 have the pitiful 1.5 Gbps SATA and can only accept 4-6GB of RAM, a 7,200 RPM hard drive would be a better match and a SSD a waste of money as the SATA is slow.

The Late 2008 can accept 8GB of RAM and have a 3 Gbps SATA for a SSD.

Problem is getting OS X onto the SSD, you would have to make a Lion USB Recovery drive or install OS X onto the SSD externally first (using a SATA to USB adapter) and holding the option key down to boot from it and test it out before making the internal switch. Also enabling TRIM support is mandatory.

Upgrading Your MacBook Pro with a Solid State Drive

http://www.mactrast.com/2011/07/how-to-enable-trim-support-for-all-ssds-in-os-x- lion/

Offload the caches to an external disk (preferably firewire) this will free up your main disk for better read/writes related to the digital files.

This really helps when using Adobe Bridge/Premeire/PS and/or Camera Raw.

blundertron wrote:

are you saying that this model won't allow for two 4GB RAM modules, only a 2GB and a 4GB? and at that point, is adding 2GB more to get to 6GB going to see much of an upgrade given the other hardware limitations?

thanks much for the help.

If you install 2 4 GB RAM chips, your MBP will only recognize 6 GB RAM maximum. The two 'extra' GB will be superfluous.

Ciao.

blundertron wrote:

are you saying that this model won't allow for two 4GB RAM modules, only a 2GB and a 4GB?

Yes, 6GB total is all you can put into that machine. Apple says 4GB, but it actually can hold 6GB.

and at that point, is adding 2GB more to get to 6GB going to see much of an upgrade given the other hardware limitations?

Yes, another 2GB isn't really going to make much of a noticable difference with your older hardware.

i recently replaced the small original HD to move to a 1TB drive, not having the money for a comparably large SSD

If it was a 7,200 RPM 1TB then that would have helped.

Another thing that can help is a fresh install and only using the first 50% of the 1TB for your MacintoshHD parittion, the other 50% is a storage partition for rarely used files knowing that second 50% of the drive is going to be terrible at performance.

You likely should have never upgraded to Mountain Lion on that machine, Snow Leopard would do fine on it.

But now since all your files are in later program version that run only on 10.7-10.8, your basically forced to upgrading your hardware.

A 2007 machine is about to croak from something else soon anyway, likely the exhaust vents behing the fans haven't been cleaned and choked full of dust and the machine has been slowly overheating which thottles the CPU and slowly kills it.

7 year old machine, you really got a good life out of it. But with the more modern programs you need the newer processors, SSD and more RAM. 😟