RAM / HDD upgrade on 2008 unibody Macbook?

I have a late 2008 unibody Macbook (bought it when they first came out). It has a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB DDR3 memory. The hard drive is 160 GB.

I don't really know anything about computers, but I would like to make my Mac a little faster since I am using it more for photography and I'd like to run Aperture and Pixelmator together with no lag time.

Is it possible to upgrade the processor? If so, how expensive is this? Do I have to take it to an Apple store to upgrade the RAM or hard drive? Like I said, I don't really know anything about this.

I am in South Korea where there is very little Apple support, but I will be back in the states for a few weeks in February and could visit an Apple store then if possible.

Any advice regarding upgrades would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks!

You cannot upgrade the processor on a mac laptop. They are one with the logic board. You can upgrade the ram and hard drive and you can do them yourself. The ram at least should be quite easy.

Here is a link to a good place to find ram. These should be compatible to your mac (you have a silver macbook unibody, right?):

MacBook, MacBook Pro

Here is a link for Hard Drive upgrades for your mac:

Apple MacBook 2.0GHz "Unibody" (13.3-inch w/ nVidia Graphics) - Late 2008

I haven't done a HDD switch on a unibody mac, only a 2007 Macbook Pro. It was a little bit of a pain to do, but not real bad. I think I heard unibodys are easier, I'm not sure though.

I believe it will be expensive to have apple do either of these.

Thanks for the info. Yes, it's one of the silver unibodies. HDD isn't a huge deal since I use an external hard drive for music and video. Apple's Aperture also lets you store photo libraries across different drives, so I might wait before upgrading the HDD.

I think I will upgrade to 4 GB of ram. I would assume it's best to go with the Samsung memory?
Thanks for the link!

MJHanson7490 said:

Thanks for the info. Yes, it's one of the silver unibodies. HDD isn't a huge deal since I use an external hard drive for music and video. Apple's Aperture also lets you store photo libraries across different drives, so I might wait before upgrading the HDD.

I think I will upgrade to 4 GB of ram. I would assume it's best to go with the Samsung memory?
Thanks for the link!

Click to expand...

And what exactly makes you think that?

For RAM you can go OEM (forget the name atm) or pick whatever other brand you want really, I went with G Skill and I love it, I'm not sure how popular they are but it still works great.