My boss's iMac needs a memory upgrade...

[CB5000]

It is the 24-inch screen iMac and supposedly it already has the maximum amount of RAM installed on it according to our university tech support. I don't have much experience messing around with Macintosh computers but the maximum of only 3GB seems too small for the 24inch iMac... OSX 10.3 is 32bit? Is there any way of increasing the amount of RAM on this system? Would upgrading to a newer operating system like OSX 10.6 help with this? As far as to when it came out... I think it was about 2007 when my boss originally got it. Just seems like a 4 year old 2000$+ computer should at least support 8GB or more... my 6 year old intel asus mobo can handle 16GB...

Main issue is that the computer is choking when it opens large posters or photoshop files as it uses up all the available memory and you get the color wheel of annoyance anytime you try to do anything. Then it turns into the color wheel of death as the entire system freezes.

[derFunkenstein]

If it's got the 945 chipset, 3GB is all you can use officially. You can go to 4GB but only ~3.5GB will be useful. That's not Apple's doing; that's Intel's design. It's like that for similar-vintage PCs.

[CB5000]

After a close look I think it does have a 945 family chipset unfortunately. Something that is confusing me is that it looks like it's the mobile version for some reason. If it had a 965 family chipset it could have had 8GB. Looks like my boss is stuck with that 3.5GB max memory

[apertur3]

After a close look I think it does have a 945 family chipset unfortunately. Something that is confusing me is that it looks like it's the mobile version for some reason. If it had a 965 family chipset it could have had 8GB. Looks like my boss is stuck with that 3.5GB max memory

It's the mobile version because all iMacs use mobile versions of Intel's chipsets and CPUs - they're already miniaturized and designed to fit in a small case so it's easier to adapt them for the slim case of the iMac.

[derFunkenstein]

Yeah, they didn't adopt desktop chips in the iMac until the first-gen i5/i7, because there's no such thing as a mobile i5 quad. The current iMacs use the S-series low-TDP Sandy Bridge quads. And even then they still continue to use mobile GPUs.