Lately I posted about the pros of upgrading to GarageBand 4. However, I told you that at least for me there are no reasons for upgrading. In the same post I thought that about upgrading to Logic 8 instead of using Logic Express 7.x. Problem here is that I would have to upgrade to a newer Mac, since my Mac Mini just have 1 Gig of RAM.

As i thought a little more, I remembered of my performance issues with GarageBand, as my compositions grew and used lots more of EXS instruments. Now I am sure that performance issues come from unsufficient memory. 1 Gig of RAM is too less for more than 6 software instruments, esspecially there are EQ tunings on em.

This issues and of course my thoughts about an upgrade to Logic 8 brought me to this post, where the guys explained in detail how to open the Mac Mini and upgrading the RAM.

Well, I did so and succeded

The post above is excellent written. Upgrading is really easy, just do it. Just one thing is to remember: if you have an Intel Core Duo you CANNOT have more RAM than 2 Gigs. You have to use 2x 1 Gig of 667 Mhz SODIMM (= notebook ram!). If you use more RAM, the screen will stay black and won’t even hear the chime.

Just the Intel Core 2 Duo seems to support more than 2 Gig. Officially it is said by Apple that a Mac Mini supports 3 Gigs. In fact I heard about people using more than 3 gigs with success. Just take a look at the performance benchmark.

So, please check out which mac you have. You can do this easily in the System Profiler (click the apple – about this mac icon).

I own now more RAM and yes, my Logic is working much better. I have nearly no performance issues anymore. I really would like to have a trial version of Logic 8, but unfortunatly Apple isn’t offering such a thing. Bad luck. I guess I will stick with Logic 7 a bit longer and enjoy my new RAM.