Upgrading MacBookPro1,1

A friend of mine has an old MacBookPro that quite readily doing what he needs it to do, aside from being a bit slow. The laptop is already upgrade to 1.5GB RAM, so I thought perhaps the best option would be to upgrade the current, original 80GB HD to SSD. OWC has a good kit for sale at $120, so wanted to know if people think this would be a good interim upgrade to breathe a little life back into the macbook. I also thought about just scrubbing and reinstall OSX on it, since I think it has never seen a full reinstall (it's been upgrade to Snow Leopard, but never full reinstalled).

I would max. out the ram before upgrading to an SSD. Max ram I believe is 2gig. Of course you could do both.

But to be honest. Paying $120 for the SSD upgrade + the cost of the ram upgrade...you would probably better better off taking that money + sell the MacBook Pro...plus maybe adding a bit of cash...and getting something newer. Maybe a used 2008 or 2009 model.

- Nick

Your friend's MacBook Pro was the first model to use the Intel processor. Anyway, I would upgrade it to 2 GB of memory (that's the max) first, and then add the SSD. That should breathe some more life into it.

chscag said:

...I would upgrade it to 2 GB of memory (that's the max) first, and then add the SSD.

Click to expand...

Hey...are we reading each others minds!!

- Nick

I took a look at the swap stats and didn't see lots of ins/outs, so don't think adding an extra .5GB RAM will help all that much. He mostly use it for surfing, itunes, sorting iPhotos, and RARE occasion Word, nothing heavily taxing.

I only thought of the SSD as a relatively inexpensive upgrade that will cut down the boot/load time a tad. I don't think he's really in the market to get a new laptop (not a real techy person).

But getting the SSD doesn't sound like a bad idea, assuming focus is minimal cost to stretch out life?

flam1111 said:

I took a look at the swap stats and didn't see lots of ins/outs, so don't think adding an extra .5GB RAM will help all that much.

Click to expand...

The less ram a Macintosh computer has...the faster the swap file & page outs grow. And grow to a point that the computer starts to slow down. So the more ram a Macintosh computer has...the longer a user can go between rebooting.

In my experience (which is fairly extensive)...this "rule" holds true for up to about 8gig of ram. For me...I have three laptops I use regularly. Two have 4gig of ram...and one has 8gig of ram. The two with 4gig of ram I need to reboot weekly because of the swap file and page out sizes. The one with 8gig of ram much less.

In your case (or friends case)...going from 1.5gig of ram to the max. of 2gig of ram is a 33% increase. Certainly not a small amount.

flam1111 said:

I only thought of the SSD as a relatively inexpensive upgrade that will cut down the boot/load time a tad. I don't think he's really in the market to get a new laptop (not a real techy person).

But getting the SSD doesn't sound like a bad idea, assuming focus is minimal cost to stretch out life?

Click to expand...

Although $120 may not be a lot of money to your friend (which is great)! This computer is probably worth about $300-$350. So a $120 investment into it (or more) is a pretty significant proportion of it's total value. This is why I say...sell it...add the $120 for the SSD upgrade + some additional cash...and your friend could have $500-$600 for a newer MacBook Pro.

Believe me. With $500-$600 to spend...a MUCH better used MacBook Pro can be purchased.

There's nothing "techy" about this...it's all about speed! And speed seems to be exactly why this SSD upgrade is being considered.

- Nick