Think it’s too hard for you to upgrade the RAM on your MacBook Pro? Not at all. In this video Dave will show you step-by-step how to disassemble the Pro, pull out the old RAM, insert the new RAM and close it back up. And – most importantly – have it work!
Keywords: MacBook, Pro, RAM, Upgrade, How, To
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Dave,
–A good video, but you could make it even better:
1. In the video, you said that, if you have bad RAM in a Mac, that you see the “sad Mac” face when you boot up the Mac.
I’m not sure if it will or will not display the “sad Mac” face (depending on what’s wrong, it might not be able to display anything on the screen), but I DO know that it’s VERY likely that a Mac with bad RAM would fail the Power-On Self Test (POST). When this happens, instead of the normal, familiar Mac startup chime, you’d hear a series of beeps, probably repeated after a delay. The beeps are signaling an error code. (If you need to know what the different codes mean, or what the specific error code beep pattern is for failing the RAM test, I suggest you either do a Google search or search on Apple’s site, and you should find them. Here’s a Wikipedia article that includes at least some of the error code info: )
If you hear the normal startup chime on a Mac, then in almost all cases, it means the RAM is good.
2. Any time I upgrade RAM or change or work on RAM in a Mac, I like to check the amount of RAM the system is reporting. I like to do this both before and after I work on the Mac, to ensure things are as I expect, with respect to the RAM. Obviously, this won’t work if there’s bad RAM in there, or some other significant hardware problem. But, it works great for routine RAM upgrades. Probably the easiest way to do this is to check the Apple menu > “About This Mac” window before and after doing the RAM upgrade, and see how much RAM the system reports in the window before and after the upgrade.
It would be good to add this advice–to always check the RAM size both before AND after a RAM upgrade–to your otherwise great RAM upgrade video.
3. It seems like you narrated the video at the same time that you were doing the disassembly. Although this might work, I think a better approach would be just to plan from the outset to make your video-making a two-pass process: One pass for the video, and a second for the audio. Record your actions (disassembly, or whatever) FIRST, possibly without talking, and THEN go back during the video editing and completely erase the sound track, and separately record the narration in place of the original sound track. This allows you to concentrate on each task separately–the physical task, and the narration task. It also makes editing out minor mistakes in either the video or audio easier, since you don’t need to re-record any audio or “match up” any new recording edits with the existing parts you’re keeping. Plus, if an unexpected noise (dog barks, train goes by, etc.) occurs while you’re making the video, it’s easier to deal with, since you don’t have to re-do BOTH the video and the audio; in this case, you’d only need to record (or re-record) the narration track, and you wouldn’t have to throw out otherwise good video of the task steps.
Since you’re most likely going to need to do at least SOME video editing anyway, splitting the video- and audio-generating tasks shouldn’t add very much extra work.
Looking forward to more videos and more questions and answers on your excellent site!
Bruce Brown
Mac Computer Consultant
Thanks. You add some great additional points, glad to have them here on the site!