Upgrading your Mac's RAM is one of the simplest and cheapest ways to improve its performance, and it might be more necessary than ever if you're running OS X Lion. While Apple states that the minimum required RAM for Lion is 2 GB, in my experience this is nowhere near enough memory to get Apple's latest OS running smoothly, especially since the latest version of Safari has a nasty habit of chewing through RAM. If you're running OS X Lion on your Mac I'd say the actual minimum RAM is more like 4 GB, and if your Mac will accept 8 GB or more, there's no reason not to max it out if you can afford to.
For some reason many Mac users have got the idea that replacing RAM will void your w