My Mac Pro is now over three years old, though the design is Early 2008 – four years ago. When I bought the machine, I had 8 Gb of RAM installed, which was fine back then, but now, when I have a large iTunes database, thousands of photos and many iMovie projects, the Mac was starting to crawl a little. Running Windows 7, under Parallels, for my weather station, was also using up vital memory.
To bring my machine back up to acceptable levels of performance, I replaced four of the 1 Gb chips with 4 Gb chips to push my memory up to 20 Gb. Hopefully, this will prevent Windows crashing so often and get rid of the dreaded spinning beach ball, which I get occasionally, especially when the backup is running.
I bought the RAM from Mr Memory, 4 X 4Gb Apple Mac Pro 2008 – 2.8GHz 8-Core Intel Xeon @ £74.50 = £298.00, with VAT, that came to £358.68. I ordered the RAM on Monday lunch time and it arrived on Tuesday morning – excellent service. I will certainly use them again, if I need more memory.
Fitting the RAM was incredibly easy, thanks to the great design of the Mac Pro. Flick the lever at the back of the Mac, take off the side panel, slide out the memory banks and swap the chips over. It really was that simple. Within five minutes, the machine was up and running again.
I’m looking forward to a much better performance now and my next project is the upgrade the graphics card, which is the obsolete ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 MB card which was in the machine when I bought it.