Posts tagged upgrade

Answer 18
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Posted 9 months ago
I'm looking to replace my hard drive (250gb just doesn't seem enough for me) and I'd love to keep it under $150. However, after looking around online, I read about a limit to how much you can upgrade (if your data exceeds the limit, overheating may occur.) So I'd like to hear your recommendations and/or experience before purchasing a new hard drive. I have a late 2008 MacBook Pro 15-inch with 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo.
renoraro asked

Did you see this a few days ago? See, thing is, I’m clairvoyant and knew you’d be asking.

Text 33
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Posted 10 months ago

Upgrade your storage

Running out of room on that MacBook? Have you started editing 1080p HD content in iMovie on that MacBook Pro? You’re probably going to need a big honkin’ yet fast hard drive in there. Have I got a solution for you!

Often, especially with laptop drives, speed, capacity and low cost were a situation where you pick two. You’re not going to get the third. Even if you begged. A lot.

Until now that is. 

The folks over at Western Digital have come up with a crackin’ hard drive for your MacBook or MacBook Pro with the Western Digital Scorpio Blue. It’s 1TB (a terabyte!), speedy and will set you back round about $100.

One more time for emphasis: $100.

Say what?! That’s right, the trifecta of cost, speed and capacity is here for the masses. NewEgg will send it to you for $105 shipped if you’re hot to just go buy it. If you don’t want to take my word for it, HotHardware has the skinny on the performance. (Warning, you best speak geek. If phrases like “areal density” scare you, just take my word for it. It’s a good drive.) They compare it to the venerable Western Digital Scorpio Black drive. Granted, they use Windows benchmarks, but they will translate fairly well to the Mac side of the house.

So, since you’re not going to get any use out of it with it sitting in a box once it arrives, head over to iFixIt to see how to cram it in there. If you search Apple’s support site properly (e.g. “macbook hard drive replacement), you can find instructions there too.

Answer 14
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Posted 10 months ago
Just purchased a 2008 mac pro, 8 cores, 8 GB of RAM, harpertown processor. This system was not used extensively. Has a clean install of 10.6 snow leopard. Any advice on what to do with older macs before I start doing anything on it? Component upgrades perhaps?
whenwemeetaliens asked

Sounds like you’re pretty well set. A good bit of kit, that. About the only thing you may want to think about bumping is the video card. It was anemic when it was new, it’ll be even worse now if you’re thinking of throwing anything heavy at it. Hit up OWC.

Answer 8
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Posted 10 months ago
So if I bought my Macbook Pro before Lion was released, Do I still have to buy it or what ?
maineholdup asked

Hit up Apple’s Up-to-Date program. Basically, if you bought a Mac from Apple after 6 June and you don’t have Lion yet, you’ll get it for free.

Answer 6
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Posted 10 months ago
I bought a new imac last September, so it's not even a year old yet. I was wondering if it was worth upgrading to Lion or sticking with Snow Leopard? Also, what would the benefits be to upgrading to Lion?
photodots asked

Performance-wise, I think you’ll be fine as long as you’ve got at least 2GB of RAM in it. I have an iMac from 2009 at home and it’s been running Lion just fine.

As far as benefits to upgrading, see Apple’s page here to get an idea of what it’ll give you. If you ask me, it’s well worth the $30.

Link 10
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Posted 10 months ago

Apple's OS X Lion Up-To-Date Program

If you bought a Mac or OS X recently, check this out for your free upgrade to Lion.

Answer 4
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Posted 10 months ago
Back again. You said "I’ll tell you right now though, don’t hold your breath for spectacular performance from Lion on that machine. You’re at the bottom of the barrel for system requirements." regarding my MacBook (mid-2007).

Would it help if I shifted to an SSD?
goingpostal asked

Could, but your performance bottlenecks are going to be your limited amount of RAM (especially) and your CPU. You’re not going to see good “bang for buck” on getting an SSD. 

Rumor has it that Apple will release new i-series based MacBook Airs when Lion drops. That is going to be your bang for buck.

Answer 20
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Posted 1 year ago
Hi, I bought my Mac Pro a few years ago for video editing and it's getting slower and slower..

It has 2 x 2.66 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xeon and 1 GB Memory.

Would buying 4 x 1gig extra memory give me a real boost or is there other ways or am I done for?

Thanks
mikechalmers asked

That Mac Pro’s got some life in it, yet. There’s a good reason why you shelled out $2500 for it when it was new. You can upgrade the snot out of it.

First thing you want to do slam some RAM in there. 1 GB is not enough for doing much of anything these days, especially video editing. If you head over to Crucial, you can pick up a 4GB kit for $159. Adding RAM is by far the biggest bang for the buck you can do for an upgrade to your Mac. Also, at some point RAM will become more expensive for your machine because RAM manufacturers may not be making that type of RAM anymore, thus the supply goes down and price goes up. I’d say you’re about at that point with your Mac Pro.

The second upgrade you can do is on that video card. Video cards in the iMac will now trounce the card that came in that Mac Pro (which was anemic for the time anyway). Head over to OtherWorldComputing to check out the ATI Radeon HD 5770. As long as you’re on Mac OS X 10.6.4 (or higher) that Mac Pro will support this card. It’ll set you back $259.

You may also want to consider storage space if you’re running a tad low. Thankfully, you can cram 4 hard drives into that Mac Pro with nary a worry. The drives you’re looking for are Serial-ATA. You can have a 1TB drive for $90 over at Amazon.

So, for under the cost of a Mac Mini, you’ll have yourself a Mac Pro that feels like a whole new machine (with some considerable balls).

Answer 16
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Posted 1 year ago
I have an older mac mini running snow leopard but i'm trying to upgrade its wireless connection to an N. Are there wireless usb adapters out there that will be compatible with my mac? So far I've only read about netgear and it not coming with the drivers for the mac.

Thanks
kpeaceo asked

Head on over to Other World Computing. They’ve got what you’re searching for.

Answer 6
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Posted 1 year ago
Hi,
I just got a seagate goflex external hard-drive and I'm still not quite sure how to use it. I want to clear our some space on my MacBook so it runs faster. Is it possible to move entire applications that i do not use often (like final cut, and garage band) on to my external hard-drive and then delete them from my laptop? Would this delete the applications forever?

Thanks for your help!
whatyougotacrushonme asked

Running applications from an external disk is generally not a good idea. The reason is that (and in particularly both examples that you’ve pointed out) there is sometimes much more than just the application itself that makes it up. There’s loads of support files for Garageband and Final Cut. For instance, I just did a file size check on my Garageband. It’s just under 200MB. I know there’s gigabytes upon gigabytes of data that Garageband needs that is stored elsewhere (in /Library/Application Support in this case)

So, just by moving the app, you’re not going to gain a whole lot. Also, running apps from an external drive may break them or cause unexpected crashes. Applications are supposed to be written well. Some aren’t. There’s bad programming habits that may have crept in there (like by using a hardcoded file path) that moving the application will break. Here’s an example:

Let’s say you move My Great Application from your Applications folder, to an Applications folder on “My USB Drive.” So, it’s literally been moved from /Applications/My Great Application.app to /Volumes/My USB Drive/Applications/My Great Application.app.

Now, let’s say an update was released for My Great Application. Let’s say the developer of My Great Application, World’s Most Rookie Developers Inc, aren’t so good at what they do. They say, “My Great Application would never be installed anywhere but /Applications/My Great Application.app! Why would you move it or install it elsewhere!?”

Having this as their assumption, they hard-code their updater to look at /Applications for their app. Their updater won’t find it on your system because you moved it. Instead, what they should have done is use Apple supported tools (Apple provides these) to see where the application is before installing the update.

This is a frequent problem on the Mac platform - companies that want in to the growing market and they don’t take the time to learn The Right Way™ of doing things. It’s really easy to learn. All it takes is a free membership to Apple’s Developer program to see all of the documentation and download the tools.

You’d be better off using a utility like Disk Inventory X to see just what is taking up all your hard drive space and then moving that to your external device. If I had to guess, your iTunes library is taking up a sizable chunk.

Good luck!