Hi.

I have a Spring 2006 Core Duo 15" MacBook Pro.

I'm taking college courses and the 2GB RAM limit is getting tight when I need to run a Windows program. And I hate rebooting to use Boot Camp.

I know the Intel 945PM chip in the later Core 2 Duo models can address 3 GB of RAM.

And it's apparently the same chip in the Core Duo model as far as I can tell.

So is it just firmware that prevents the MBPro from recognizing a 2GB + 1GB RAM configuration?

Has anybody found a way to defeat this? There have been a couple of firmware updates for this model but apparently they didn't change the RAM limit.

I thought about getting a SSD Expresscard. SSD is fast.

If I could move the Virtual RAM or at least Parallels 5 over to the SSD, it might perk up a bit.

And yes, I read that running VRAM on a SSD could wear it out.

Yea, there is a 2GB limit on the Core Duo models. There isn't really a way around it. I'm not sure what version of windows you are running on your parallels, but I probably wouldn't run anything more than XP with the RAM you have.

Never heard of trying the SSD for the virtual RAM. Might work, but it will be expensive to replace if it does wear it down fast like you said as it'll be constantly writing and reading from it.