Can you please tell me about this MacBook Pro?

Question

Thank you for taking the time to read this and hopefully helping me out. I am a first time Mac purchaser and I feel a bit out of my element here.
I am thinking of buying this MacBook Pro
(http://store.apple.com/us/product/FB604?mco=MTM3NDgzMzY)
If am not using the computer for editing or games, it will be for watching movie on-line and my dvd's.
Questions:
1.) The add says the computer has 4gigs of RAM. 256MB of shared RAM. And finally, a 512MB of graphics memory. What does this mean exactly? What does shared mean for this setup? Please feel free to give me as much info as possible.
2.) Overall, would it be a mistake to get this computer?
3.) Is that a decent amount of RAM and stuff for the video cards to work and also allow the OS to run well?
4.) When was this MacBook Pro made? Is it like from 2007 or something? Is this pretty much a new model or is it one of the first uni-body models a few years back?
Thank you for helping me out.
Message was edited by: Avi Rosenberg

Answer 1

The MacBook Pro you are considering is an early 2009 model. I own two of the 17" MacBook Pros the late 2008 models with the removable batteries. I looked hard and long and found one still on the shelf as NOS and bought it for the wife. I am not fond of the internal batteries like the model you are considering. When it comes time to change it--and that time will certainly come--it's not as snappy as push a button and remove.
4GB of ram on this computer is plenty. Today. 8GB is the future benchmark. I have 16GB in my i7 which tells you where ram is going to be. You can update ram cheaply at any time. Buying a computer is like owning a garage. You keep adding stuff until one day you drive home to find there is no room to park the car in the garage. Buy the most ram, best processor and biggest hard drive you can grow into for the next few years.
Here are the answers to your questions:
RAM: the power to work quickly.
RAM (Random Access Memory) is the memory your Mac uses to run software applications and store frequently accessed data. Adding RAM improves the performance of your entire experience: opening and working with large files; using the Finder and other elements of Mac OS X; and running graphics, audio, video, and scientific applications. In addition, more RAM speeds up your computer when you have lots of applications open at the same time.
Hard drive: room to work and play.
The hard drive is where your Mac stores all your data when you’re not using it. The capacity of a hard drive, measured in gigabytes, or GB, tells you how much room you have to store your files and applications. A typical application today may take 10 to 50 megabytes (MB); photos may take up about 2-4MB each; graphics files can occupy more than 100MB; and video files are often many gigabytes in size.
The standard hard drive in every Mac offers enough space for average users to store their documents and digital media. If you’re a photo, music, or video aficionado who likes to collect media files, a larger hard drive will give you room to grow your collection.
Processor: the high-speed engine of your Mac.
The processor is the brains of your Mac. Every second, it completes the billions of calculations needed to perform every computing task. Most Mac models feature the Intel Core 2 Duo family of processors, with twin processor cores that pack twice the power of a standard processor in the same space.
With many Mac models, you can upgrade the processor to a faster speed. If you plan to do processor-intensive tasks such as video rendering, gaming, and working with large, multi-track audio files, a faster processor can improve the performance of your Mac.
Graphics processor: your world in high resolution.
A graphics processor is simply a processor dedicated to turning huge amounts of data into graphics and video output. By taking this task away from the main processor, a graphics processor also makes the entire system faster and more responsive.
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