Just upgraded RAM and HDD on 2006 MBP

Went from 1 GB RAM to 2 GB, and upgraded from the factory 120 GB, 5400 RPM Fujitsu HDD to a 640 GB, 7200 RPM Samsung Spinpoint.

Everything is working...but I didn't get the boost in speed I was expecting. I measure start-up time from the time I hit the power button until I got my first web page open in Firefox. Before any upgrade it took 2 minutes to do this. After upgrading RAM is shortened the time to 1:45. After swapping out the HDDs it shortened to about 1:35.

The computer is a little quicker when opening programs. It use to take about 20-30 seconds to start my Photoshop CS3 program, and now it is open and functional in 10 seconds...so that part is nice. What bugs me is that when I first turn on the computer there's nothing but a blank, grey screen for about 20 seconds before the apple logo appears, then it's about another 20-30 seconds before the screen pops up where I can click my username.

Is there anything that can be done to make the start-up process a little quicker?

If this belongs in the Software forum please move it. TIA!

If you have the means, I would suggest an SSD drive with an optibay, so that way, you can still use the spinpoint that you bought. You can get a 40-60gb ssd and see pretty fast improvements. What OS are you using? I wouldn't expect too much from a 1.16ghz mbp.

I probably do have the means...but after having just gotten a new SATA drive I'll wait a while before buying something like the SSD drives. They are intriguing though.

Here's the quick specs on my MBP:

AUZambo said:

I probably do have the means...but after having just gotten a new SATA drive I'll wait a while before buying something like the SSD drives. They are intriguing though.

Here's the quick specs on my MBP:

Click to expand...

I knew there had to be an error with the specs on your listing! 2.16 is not bad with SL. It should be very possible to get boot times close to 40-50 seconds with a great-good ssd.

I'd have to ask how much stuff you have loading at startup?
When's the last time you ran Onyx or MainMenu?

You're already talking an almost 25% improvement in the startup times to load a page. And 50-65% faster in launching CS3 is only a little quicker? Not sure what you were expecting here.

My machine is the same age as yours only with the 2.33 instead of the 2.16.

My machine was booting in 45-48 seconds with the original 120GB drive. After upgrading to the WD Black 320GB drive I was booting to a usable desktop in 28 seconds after a clean install and 32-36 seconds on average after I had everything put back on it.

While that Samsung may not be as fast as the WD black - you've got something else going on if it's taking a minute to boot to the desktop. For testing, you need to remove everything from startup and then a: time it from power on to login screen or b: enable auto login and time it to full desktop. Only way to get proper comparison numbers against other configurations.

And timing experiments should be done during a reboot when there were no applications opened on the previous boot, not during a reboot when you have been using the machine with various apps open/in use. OS X uses the boot time to clean the temporary cache created by several apps.

And then of course, a great many of us that are even interested in this type of stuff never turn our machines off to begin with except as required, so we're not even experiencing boot times on a day to day basis.

bobtomay said:

I'd have to ask how much stuff you have loading at startup?
When's the last time you ran Onyx or MainMenu?[/B]

Click to expand...

Ah...that's what I was looking for! I've never even heard of those two things. I installed OnyX and just cleaned my system thoroughly for as far as I know the first time since I've owned it.

Complete restart now only takes only 35 seconds.

I figured there HAD to be some sort of utility thing I could run...I just had no idea where it was. Thanks a ton!