I’ve been running into memory shortage issues lately on my MacBook Pro. It comes with 4 GB which was sufficient but lately I find myself having too many tabs open in Chrome and when I have it running along with Firefox and one or two other programs, I start to hit the limit. This was especially true when I was running Ubuntu Linux in VirtualBox.
I decided to upgrade the memory. After checking prices, I decided to get 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) from Crucial. It cost $76 for the set and arrived in about a week. 16 GB is overkill but for the price, I figured maxing the RAM was the way to go to help future-proof the computer as much as I can.
The screws on the bottom of the MacBook Pro are really small. One in particular was quite stubborn but I did manage to get it out. After removing the screws, I just had to pop the two 2 x 2 GB sticks out and insert the new “Mac compatible” memory from Crucial. I made sure to get 1600 MHz DDR3 just like what the system had to begin with.
I should now have more RAM than I’ll ever need. My next upgrade sometime in the future might be an SSD drive to speed up the system even more.