Considering that it appears to be a snap to install memory in these and 2Gb from Apple is $500, this is the way to go. Get the minimum from Apple and order the upgrade from OWC or RamJet or...

Except Apple only charges $100 for the 1GB upgrade. It's $9 cheaper to get 1GB from Apple, but $251 cheaper to get the 2GB from this source.

According to the OWC website, to upgrade my 2Ghz MacBookPro from 1GB (On a single module..what it showed up with from Apple) to 2GB, I have to buy two "matched" 1GB modules. Is that really nessesary? Can't I just buy another 1GB module and plug it in? Will I take that big of performance hit?

no.. you'll be fine

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mactoid wrote:
According to the OWC website, to upgrade my 2Ghz MacBookPro from 1GB (On a single module..what it showed up with from Apple) to 2GB, I have to buy two "matched" 1GB modules. Is that really nessesary? Can't I just buy another 1GB module and plug it in? Will I take that big of performance hit?

Matched means the same type of memory of the same size in both slots. The reason this is necessary is for dual-channel architecture to get the maximum bandwidth, it needs both slots filled. It can then act as though it has a 128-bit bus instead of a 64-bit bus.

If your DIMMs or SODIMMs are of the same memory capacity and have the same timing characteristics, you'll be fine. If they aren't matched, it will affect the performance of the computer because memory transfers to and from the cpu will be slowed.

This is completely incorrect. The *MacBook Pro* does not experience any decrease in performance when using a single SODIMM, as it has its own GPU and dedicated video memory. The *MacBook* does technically lose some performance when using a single SODIMM, since its graphics memory is shared with system memory. However, most benchmarks show this performance decrease to be very minor.