This thread on the Crucial forums says you should be dandy. In fact, they'll guarantee it.
It's a better situation than I'm in - my mid-2007 MacBook will only use 3GB of the 4GB that's in it:
Incidentally, I once had a several-years-old bit of Crucial memory go faulty on me. Their customer service was brilliant - not only were there no quibbles about the lifetime warranty, they also cheerfully offered to replace the second module I'd bought at the same time, so that I could still have a matching pair.
What's that, you want me to post a question? Well only if you insist!
Okay, well the big question is WHY DOESN'T THE SOUND ON MY LAPTOP WORK? The more detailed question breaks down into the following components:
The audio output on my PC is usually by an Intel HD Display Audio driver, which appears to work alongside a Conexant Smart Audio HD driver which fiddles with the audio settings depending on what the speakers are. Normally this usually works nicely and everyone gets along fine, but recently it's all gone to shit. I usually put my laptop into hibernation instead of shutting it down, as I've never noticed any problems, but every now and then my PC wakes up and turns itself off when it's in hibernation (I've watched it turn on and off whilst trying to sleep), and when I turn it back on I have no sound.
The Windows Troubleshooter says that it's something to do with the Intel driver, whilst the Conexant driver always pops up when the sound doesn't work to let me know it can't find a 'Conexant HD audio device' and is going to exit. Windows never works out what the problem is, doing all it's troubleshooting scans and then concluding that something's up but it doesn't know what - I have just uninstalled my drivers and it appears to have reinstalled generic ones in the place of the special ones, but these don't work and it now claims that the Conexant driver needs reinstalled, but don't worry, it'll do it for me! What it actually means is that it will attempt to do it, fail and then tell me it's all done with the footnote 'not fixed' - I have therefore came to the conclusion the Windows troubleshooter is a useless waste of space.
I have uninstalled the drivers, reinstalled them, completed numerous system restores but I am yet to find a solution. A system restore normally fixes it until I turn my computer off and on again, whilst uninstalling and reinstalling drivers never works.
I quite like hearing sound so I would like the benefits of it once more - no-one on the internet ever has encountered the same problem as me so forums have been useless, as have Dell (who built my Inspiron laptop).
Inbuilt soundcards are usually shite (I can't hear my voice when recording, for example) especially generic ones or ones shipped with lower-end PCs (mine has something called Realtek HD sound, whatever that is). For a few quid, a USB soundcard can solve most of your problems. The Soundblaster X-Fi Go is my weapon of choice (about the same size as a dongle.)
nodnirG kraM wrote:Well that's fabulous, and you're wonderful. Thanks for such a comprehensive answer! Only rhetorical question that remains really is will a 2.5GHz i5 processor 2012 MacBook actually benefit from 16 rather than 8GB RAM!
For what I use the poor machine for, I should hope it would!!
If I were you I would stick with the RAM you've got and put the money towards switching the HDD to an SSD. It makes a huge difference to start up times, application launch times etc on my mid 2012 MBP. Yes, having a matching pair of RAM modules will improve performance, but I don't think it will be that significant.
