Maximize Your Older MacBook Pro’s Performance With SSD And RAM Upgrades

MacTuts+’s Toby Seers has posted a tutorial on how to fit your Mac with a speedy Solid-State Drive (SSD). Seers notes that upgrading RAM has traditionally been a relatively cheap way to increase your Mac’s speed and make your Mac run smoother if you have multiple applications open at the same time and generally allows your Mac to do more without slowing it down. However, adding an SSD will be make your laptop run faster than it ever has – a lot faster.

Seers observes that SSD prices have been falling rapidly year over year, and you’ll be able to find plenty of options for less than $1/GB, and explains how to find the best SSD for your Mac and provides a step by step guide to installing it.

You can check it out at:
http://goo.gl/oAwMA

Maximize An Old Mac’s Performance

MacFixIt’s Topher Kessler says if you have an older Mac system that seems to be on the slowish side, a few upgrades can help you get the most out of it.

He suggests that first you should a look at how much RAM you are using on a regular basis using the Activity Monitor utility. If the Page Out frequency is high and the Swap Used count is regularly in the hundreds of megabytes or gigabytes in size, then the system is regularly writing memory contents to the hard drive to free up physical RAM for other purposes.

In such cases Kessler says, your use of the system is regularly demanding more RAM than is installed, and you should look into purchasing a RAM upgrade.

Another component that is a major contributor to slowdowns is the hard drive, especially in instances where you are low on memory and the system writes memory contents to disk. Replacing the conventional hard drive with an SSD can speed things up.

For more tips on rejuvenating performance on elderly Macs, see:
http://goo.gl/DAzKP