Hi there,
The title is pretty self explanatory. Just wondering if more RAM will help. I have 4 Gigs of ram currently installed in my iMac, and I'm wondering if upgrading the RAM will help Adobe products launch faster as they are so slow to start. Office 2016 is also slow to start.
Thanks!
iMac, OS X El Capitan (10.11.5), Mid 2011 iMac
Four GB of RAM is pretty minimal amount to run OS X on. Typically, more RAM will not help open ACC the first time, but should you close the app and later restart it, yes, the additional RAM will help, particularly if you operating on "virtual memory" (where the HD is used as virtual memory). However, more RAM should be more comfortable for OS X, which in turn may (maybe) will help ACC launch faster. If you buy more RAM be sure to purchase from OWC or Crucial, as they are known to be compatible with Macs.
Thank you so much! Do you know if it will assist in boot times also?
It may (again maybe) help with boot times, but probably not much as that process is virtually pure HD activity. However, if you add a solid state drive, and boot from that, yes, the boot (and ACC launch times) will dramatically improve.
So if I bought a 500 GB Solid State SSD and installed it and put everything on it, I'd see a major speed increase?
Yes, but it will require more than simply copying your HD to the SSD. An excellent way to do this is to use "SuperDuper!" or "Carbon Copy Cloner" software to make a clone of your HD and then designate that as the boot drive. Each come with instructions on exactly how to do this.
Thank you so much for your help! Love these discussion boards. Will definitely be looking into Solid State SSDs for my iMac.
You're welcome. Again, you might want to check out OWC online. They offer a huge variety of Mac hardware and have a variety of solid state drives offered. It'll at least give you some ideas of what is available off-the-shelf. I've never looked what Crucial may have to offer in that regard.
Alright thanks! I'll definitely check them out. It feels like just yesterday I was installing OS X Tiger on my PowerMac G4. Crazy to think about all these new technologies. 🙂
Just a word of caution: if you are referring to your 2011 iMac, then remember that this is now 5 years old; technologies change/improve so quickly that you are running the latest OS version - which is optimized for newer models - on an older machine. I would think about saving my money to purchase a newer Mac (great savings at the Apple refurb store which includes a full warranty) rather than buying an expensive SSD and more RAM. Just a thought.
Thank you! Normally I would buy a new Mac, but the computer runs the OS perfectly. It's just Office '16 and Adobe software at this point.
Adobe (and all image editing/rendering software) is RAM hungry and likes a very fast processor (which you can't do anything about). Even 4 or 6 GB of RAM will not improve it all that much - you'd need 12, 16, or more especially running El Capitan and Adobe. I can't comment on Office since I've never used it.
Well, I'm glad I just bought these Crucial 8GB RAM cards. I bought two, so It's gonna be 16 GB. Then I have two 2GB cards, to make it 4. All together, once the cards arrive I'll have 20 GB. Will that be good?
That sounds great!
Alright thanks! Can't wait for my iMac to return to it's fast old self 😝
Babowa is absolutely correct about cost to upgrade vs. new or refurb. There's always the cost / benefit ratio to consider. And, at some point these older Macs will no longer be able to run the latest OS. I have a mid-2010 i-Mac and I expect that in a year or two it will be locked in to a given OS.
Will RAM improve start time of Adobe Creative Cloud Apps?
