It's not IF...It's WHEN....HD Failure!

[CallMeAl]

I found out today that my hard drive in my MacBook Pro is taking it's last gasps. According to the Apple Store guys, I may still be able to hook up a firewire cable and backup some of the data though which is a good thing.

I'm having a new 500 gb hard drive installed and will upgrade the RAM. Even though memory is cheap, do you think I'll notice much of a difference between 2 gb of RAM and 4gb?

[RKEnnis]

Originally Posted by CallMeAl

Even though memory is cheap, do you think I'll notice much of a difference between 2 gb of RAM and 4gb?

It depends on what you are doing, but yes. OS X seems to run much better in 4GB.

[tukaniray]

+1 where it depends on what you are doing.

I found my render times to kick it up a notch is even one more gb of Ram.

You will notice that the OS will run a bit smoother too. Not as much lag from your softwares.

-Ray-

[CallMeAl]

Thanks...I think going with 4 gb is only going to cost about $100, so it seems like the route to go. It's a pain, but I'm glad everything is backed up.

[msabas]

I think its a big difference on the ram with just the everyday use of programs, I tend to run photoshop, illustrator and bridge all together on 2gb right now and its ok but i do notice a bit of lagg here and there sometimes.. 4gb would be awesome.

Also just incase you dont have a firewire or external drive to back up your stuff.. you can just burn everything to a DVD. I had issues with my mac book pro at one time and all i had available was the DVD it took 3 dvds total for the back up and 2 of those was nothing but music from itunes.. so im sure the main componetnts will fit onto one DVD..just a suggestion...

[engstrom]

I just upgraded my wife's aluminum unibody Macbook from 2GB to 6GB and it runs much better. She is the queen of using lots of programs at the same time (Safari with a half dozen tabs, iChat, Skype, Numbers/Excel 2004 (but mainly Numbers these days), and a few others) and there's almost no swapping or page in/outs now so overall the experience is much better.

As for hard drive failures, I really recommend using Time Machine. For personal backups it's about as good as it gets. I have a drive plugged into my Airport Extreme and both my wife's MacBook and my MacBook Pro backup wirelessly to that drive. Although using an Airport Extreme with a shared drive is not a supported configuration for Time Machine (only a Time Capsule is supported) it does work.

[RKEnnis]

1++++ on the recommendation of Time Machine. The ability to easily pull previous version of a file from backup is awesome!

The Time Machine user interface is pretty cool too...