At one time it wasn't unusual to upgrade memory and other computer components
. However, during the 1990's and the early 2000's, the cost of buying a new computer became so inexpensive that the conventional wisdom was changed to buying an entire ne computer as opposed to upgrading memory and other computer components.
But, with the current economic situation, it is hard for most consumers to justify buying a new computer. Therefore, the upgrade of memory and other computer components has once become the best way to get the most for the consumer's money. These are some of the most cost effective and common upgrades to your Macbook computer that most consumers can do in their own at home.
Probably the best computer upgrade that will provide a significant improvement in the responsiveness and overall speed of your Macbook computer is a memory upgrade. Most brand name computers companies ship their computers with what is called shared memory, meaning that the computer uses the RAM memory to both render the graphic images that are sent out to the computer's monitor and to process instructions.
Therefore, the amount of gigabytes of memory that the computer is shipped with is not completely available for the processor to use. With games and other heavily graphics intensive applications this shared memory configuration will frequently result in poor performance.
This problem can be significantly reduced by adding additional memory and doing so is an easy process that most consumers can do on by themselves easily. There are any numbers of websites that the consumer can search for the type of memory that will work with a Macbook computer. For those people who don't think that they have the technical expertise and are afraid to open the case of their Macbook computer and install the additional memory themselves most computer repair shops will now provide installation assistance, although it is somewhat expensive. It only takes a consumer somewhere around 5 minutes to install new RAM in their Macbook computer.
Another way to free up the Macbook computer's shared memory is to install a dedicated graphics card. This allows the motherboard to do the intense graphics processing and is simply a card that slips into an empty slot. In most cases, the addition of a dedicated graphics card will provide a significant amount of performance improvement although it is considerably more expensive that a memory upgrade.