1.5 gb of ram vs. 1gb

I would add a gig now, and add another one down the road if you can afford it.

How To Determine Your Memory Needs >>

- Bmer
Mac Owners Support Group
Join Us @ MacOSG.com
ITMS: MacOSG Podcast
 An Apple User Group 

Disclaimer required by Apple Discussions Terms of Use: MacOSG - a non-profit Apple User Group - may receive some form of compensation, financial or otherwise, from my recommendation or link.

I was also in the situation that you were. I had 512 mb of ram and I upgraded to 1.5 gig. I bought a 1 gig stick from Other World Computing, I also installed the ram myself to save some money. More ram is always better then less. I had the same question as you about matching sticks of ram, but my understanding, like i said, is that more ram is better.

If you have 512MB of RAM right now, and that's what your computer came with, that means you have 2x256MB (two 256MB RAM SO-DIMMs). In order to upgrade, you will have to remove one of those chips, so if you buy a 1GB chip, for instance, you'll end up with 1.25GB of RAM, not 1.5.

That said, an upgrade to 1.25GB would definitely be worth it.

Whoops, strike that. I forgot, Apple uses one 512MB DIMM in the new MBP. :-P

Impossible to say without knowing what your current memory utilization is. Open up Activity Monitor (in the Utilities) folder, click on the memory tab, and watch it while you do the typical things that you do with your Mac. If you find that you are using more than 1GB of virtual memory, you would probably benefit by maxing out the RAM on your MBP.

The best thing you can do to maximize the performance of your laptop and increase it's longevity is to max out the RAM. Get as much as you can within your price limit, but do not buy low-quality RAM.

You do not NEED to buy Apple brand RAM, there are a couple high quality brands (use google). Buy what you can get.

An important thing to note when buying ram is that there are only 3 companies that produce ram. I bought my ram from Other World Computing and have had no trouble. I know that curcial also has good stuff. Check a wide variety of places for prices.

I think there are more than 3 companies that produce the parts for RAM. I agree that you should buy as much as you can, and that you might feel more comfortable buying from an established name. I bought 2GB from Corsair a few weeks ago and so far it's working fine.