KnIgHtCoM

Does the pre-unibody MBP support 6GB of RAM? And does it run in dual-channel?

BetterMakeWay

No sweat! I'm glad some of that info helped others.

I never heard that! And if it's true than how can 6 GB be achieved? 2x3GB kits?? That's very odd and pretty unlikely one will find such a kit that's also Apple compatible.

In fact many people are upset of the RAM shortcoming in the MBP. Those are probably people that do extreme rendering and editing while multitasking into virtual machines

KnIgHtCoM

Been running 2x2GB Patriot sticks in my MBP with no issues. Plenty of RAM to be had for cheaper than Apple: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList....amp;srchInDesc=

BetterMakeWay

Yes that is correct, no sweat about it. It's that from countless years of PC handling and building custom rigs i found that it's better not to partially transform the mac into a PC by bringing back all the bad PC habits.

If you go down this road you can very well change the hdd by yourself or other custom built hardware.

IMHO it's better to leave the Mac as it is...although RAM may be ok to swap. I for one would be careful even with that.

UUronL

I have a Leopard VM that runs on my Windows boxes...

KnIgHtCoM

I can't get OSX86 to run crash free on my Windows box.

BetterMakeWay

Crash free? No way.

PS: VM is so over rated. Those are good only for scaling server jobs, or for using some apps on another OS (limited). Most of the virtual machine apps out there don't even know to take advantage of the multicore procs, aka running single core.

PSS: But what do you do when windows burps a blue screen at you? LOL

BetterMakeWay

It cannot be done! OSX is very sensitive on a VM. The same can be said about porting OSX to run native on a PC (aka Hackintosh). You can do the voodoo to install it will NEVER EVER be as stable as the original Mac OSX.

ImolaRedM

The late 2008 MBP's support 6GB by using one 4GB stick with an additional 2GB stick. While the chipset supports 8GB, the laptop doesn't like the 2x4GB configuration. Some speculate either a firmware or OS limitation - most likely it's the Firmware since the OS will support much more than 16GB. Officially, apple only supports 4GB and earlier MBP's would only support 4GB (even unofficially).

Apple just released new firmware today. No word yet if it changes the laptop's ability to address 8GB.

Either way, given that most Windows laptops will only address just over 3.5GB this is a real bonus for those wanting to run virtual environments in a portable.

ImolaRedM

I would respectfully disagree. There are lots of uses in both development and for testing. Not to mention if you have to run an application that is only written for a particular OS. I have even configured an entire team using virtual environments to simplify support and reduce cost. My least favorite application is in a production server environment but even there it has it's place.

As for multiple core support that's partially true. But in a laptop you normally only have two cores to work with anyway. But even VMWare Fusion has support for more cores.

I've used many different virtual environments on various native and virtual OSes and I can say they're not all created equal. Some are definitely better than others. My current favorite is VMWare Fusion on OSX as my native OS.