![]() Given that everything else is already maxed out, we wanted to upgrade to an SSD in order to squeeze a bit more life out of this laptop. Still, when doing something more than reading e-mail or browsing a few webpages, performance slows to a crawl once the 2GB RAM limit is hit and Mac OS X starts paging virtual memory to and from the hard disk. ![]() It's not the fastest Mac on the planet, but for many tasks it is a serviceable machine. It also has Microsoft Office 2011, iLife '11, and Adobe Creative Suite CS3 installed. The MacBook can't run Lion, thanks to its practically ancient 32-bit processor, but it does run the latest version of Snow Leopard. It originally came equipped with an 80GB 5400rpm drive, but recently had a monster 500GB 7200RPM Seagate drive stuffed inside. That includes maxing the installed RAM to 2GB (from 512MB) and gradually increasing the hard drive capacity. Unlike the iBook before it, Apple designed MacBooks to make upgrading the hard drive (and the RAM) relatively simple, so this machine has already seen a few upgrades over the last several years. In fact, the only original equipment is the LCD, LCD housing, and logic board. ![]() Apple Care replaced nearly everything, including the keyboard, bottom casing, battery, and optical drive. It recently had some major repair work due to a faulty expanding battery. Upgrade considerationsįor this how-to, we had at our disposal an original 2.0GHz Core Duo (yup, 32-bit) white MacBook. Here, we'll tell you how to perform the same upgrade. Still, even our old original Intel MacBook-which, as we'll explain later, actually represents a worst case scenario-went from just barely usable to actually productive in just a few hours. We decided to investigate, and as it turns out, thanks to a common 2.5" drive size and widely available external enclosures, the swap is quicker, easier, and cheaper than the one for a MacBook Air.ĭepending on the age of your machine and in some cases BTO drive options, the amount of the speedup will vary. When we recently detailed how to boost the storage space in a MacBook Air with a replacement solid state drive module, some readers asked what it would be like to swap the hard drive in an older MacBook with a similarly speedy SSD.
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