Chosen Solution
I have a late 2008 2.4 GHz mbp that does not boot because of a damaged HD, which I will be replacing. I want to upgrade the memory at the same time. Without it booting, how do I tell how much memory it already has installed?
You would have to open it up and see how much each stick of ram is. There should be a sticker that says like “2gb” or “1gb” on it stuck to the ram. Here’s the ram with the sticker that says how much ram: PC3-8500 2 GB RAM Chip
The standard is 2GB of RAM, however, even though apple won’t confirm this, with the late model 2.4GHz you are capable of upgrading to 8GB of PC3-8500 DDR if you’re on snow leopard and have the updated boot ROM version MBP51.007E.B05 which you’ll find under the “About this Mac” extended view. I recently installed the upgrade and it works great. Something to consider to optimize performance. “*Apple officially supports a maximum of 4 GB of RAM. Originally, this model was only unofficially capable of stably supporting 6 GB of RAM, but as confirmed by site sponsor OWC, it is capable of supporting 8 GB of RAM if updated to Boot ROM Version MBP51.007E.B05 and running MacOS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard.”
