2011 Macbook pro 13" max ram capacity?

Found an answer in my continued search, but i do have a different question.

1. Macbook pro 13" is getting bogged down/laggy with some large documents open. and her free ram is 400megs... could ram be the reason its getting slow?
she doesnt have much open besides startup items, skype, and word<---- when she opens large word documents it seems to aggravate problem at times. In activity monitor nothing seems to be eating processing power. (sometimes she figures skype is the problem, so we close skype which helps sometimes, but sometimes it doesnt)

Im not to familiar with macbook ram usage in comparison to windows... but my Acer run of the mill laptop with 8gb of ram has about 4 gigs free with skype and chrome with like 10 tabs open. 400megs out of 4gigs free seems low... but maybe macs operate different in dealing with memory? (we skype for long durations 6 plus hours(just leaving it on), could that have an effect? it doesnt seem to phase my acer aside from blowing fans...)

-Sam

well just go to the crucial web site but it seems to say 16gb

Your MacBook Pro 2.3GHz Intel Core i5 (13-inch DDR3) Early-2011 System Specs
System specs as shipped by the manufacturer.

16GB kit (8GBx2)
DDR3 PC3-10600 • CL=9 • Unbuffered • NON-ECC • DDR3-1333 • 1.35V • 1024Meg x 64 • • Part #: CT3327370
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does this look like yours?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUbT4kP2KSw

If it is a memory problem, you will see the spinning beach ball.

I have a 1.7Ghz Core i5 Macbook Air - fairly similar but perhaps a bit slower. I do not see a slowdown with quite a bit more than that open regularly: Word, Skype, Adium, Firefox, Chrome, Outlook, TextEdit, BB Edit, Preview. Often several more, and I do not see any slowdown.

Thank you for our inputs. Havent figured out the reason for lags. Some documents lag, some dont. At the least increasing her macbooks memory cant hurt, so Ill try that to at least mitigate the problem, since Im not able to physically troubleshoot her macbook. (currently in a long distance relationship ) there is only so much I can do googling possible problem than walking her through the process of checking this and that without us both getting a bit irritated lol

if you are having random pauses and hangs there is a good chance the hard drive is the culprit.

there are remote desktop apps for the mac you should be able to find one in the iTunes store