My 8 GB of Happiness!

It doesn't take much, folks.

On Sunday afternoon I ordered an 8 GB memory kit for my MacBook (unibody, 13-inch, late 2009) from Ramjet.  It arrived Tuesday afternoon. A half hour later, I had it installed.  8 GB bliss!  That's pretty quick gratification.

This upgrade doubled my MacBook memory from 4 GB to 8 GB.  It also enabled me to increase my Win7 VirtualBox VM from 1 GB to 2 GB.  And what a difference in performance this makes!  Personally, I wouldn't buy another Mac without at least 8 GB of RAM.  Of course, YMMV.

Now I've got plenty of space to run my Win7 and Ubuntu VMs alongside all my regular native Mac OS X programs, but without all that nasty paging to hard disk.  Sweet!

The price of this particular upgrade was great, too.  It was around $150 plus shipping and tax.  I don't recall the price being anywhere near this good the last time I checked.

Kudos to Apple and to iFixit for making this upgrade so painless!  In addition to the memory modules themselves, all I had to deal with were eight screws, three clips, and a battery connector.  I didn't even strip any screws in the process!

Interestingly, I experienced some difficulty on the first boot after the upgrade.  The MacBook had apparently forgotten its date and time and such.  I was surprised.  Normally, CMOS batteries maintain these settings.  Perhaps these newer MacBooks with non user replaceable batteries don't have CMOS batteries?  In any case, resetting the PRAM and NVRAM and then connecting to the network fixed this up.

I'm a happy camper right now.  *smile*

--Bri