Blog of Hamlesh

Recently I’ve been using my MacBook more and more, pretty much for everything, and the 2Gb of RAM it came with just wasnt enough. Now this is one of the easiest upgrades in the world universe to do, and pretty much anyone could do this – although if you screw up your macbook, its your fault and not mine :p

How much RAM can the macbook take?

Using the information on wikipedia, this is straight forward enough to work out. Load up system profiler, in the “hardware overview” section (should be the default section that loads when system profiler starts up), you’ll see the “Bus Speed”.

• 667 Mhz BUS means that you can install 4GB of RAM, but only 3GB will be usable.
• 800 Mhz BUS means that you can install 4Gb of RAM, and use all of it

What RAM do I need?

Refer to this Apple knowledge base article, I have the standard MacBook (ie: not the unibody aluminium thing), so for mine its;

• DDR SO-DIMM (30mm)
• PC2-5300 DDR2 667 MHz 200 PIN

I grabbed two of these from ebuyer.com, £39.20 inc VAT and next day delivery, which isn’t bad at all for 4Gb of RAM

How do I install it?

Really, this was the simplest thing in the world to do. I think this could actually be less complicated than tieing your shoelaces, so if you can do up your own shoes, and if you can use the interwebs, this shouldn’t cause you any sort of issue – if it does, sign up for “special school”.

1. SHUTDOWN – don’t hibernate
2. Take the battery off
3. Remove the three screws across the top edge, remove panel
4. Pull out the levers and eject the RAM
5. Insert new RAM (be sure to put them in the right way around)
6. Replace panel, replace screws, replace battery
7. Boot up and be happy

^-Removing the three screws across the top edge

^-Ejecting the installed RAM

^-Insert new RAM – NOTE ORIENTATION (notch is on the left hand side)

All done

Oh and obviously, don’t be super cheap, replace the RAM in pairs, for less than £40, its well worth doing it right.

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PS: Sorry for the poor quality pics, only have by BlackBerry camera on me.