fos
02-02-2010, 08:07 PM
When I purchased the MacBook Pro, I thought the resources were a little meager at 2 gigs of ram and only 160 gig of storage. The Toshiba I returned had twice that amount and performed badly. The tech did agree that something was wrong with that machine and allowed me to return it with no penalty.
With the standard resources, the Mac performed better than any computer I have ever owned. Startup time to actual work is roughly 20 seconds. Even with multiple tasks running, it blazed through everything. I still felt that the storage capacity was a little low.
I found a Seagate Momomentus 320 hard drive with 7200 rpm spindle speed with a decent price at Newegg. Knowing that I would be inside the machine, I opted to purchase 4 gigs of ram. I chose the Kensington Hyper that had the best specs available. Both the ram and the hard drive came to about $220, less than half if I had purchased the same thing already installed at BestBuy. The CPU with the pre-installed system was a little faster but probably insignificant.
As background, I expected to install VMWare Fusion 3 and a licensed copy of Win XP that I had on the shelf. I thought the extra resources would be beneficial.
I found a couple of videos on YouTube that covers hard drive and ram installation. You can view one here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoHNcjCyAvU. There is a link to the other one there as well. They are excellent videos produced by OWC.
As long as you have a quality tiny phillips head screw driver and the tint torx screw drive it is a simple procedure. Just a bunch of screws. One note: the three long screws for the case and all four of the torx mounting screws on the hard drive had blue semi-permanent LockTite compound on them. You need a good screw driver and careful technique to remove and replace them with stripping the heads.
I had everything swapped out and back in place in less than half an hour. It was now time to reinstall the operating system and the changes I had made along with the software I installed. I had been using Apple Time Machine backup software, saving to an external Seagate USB hard drive. The instructions stated to plug in the backup disk and insert the OS X install disk and then select restore from the drop down utility menu. I followed the directions and about an hour later I had a completely restored system. Everything was just like it was prior to the hard drive transplant.
WaHoo!!! I have never had an easier to use back up system. The only thing that was amiss was the Mysql passwords. The passwords were gone. The databases were there but there was no password protection. I reset the passwords and everything was perfect!
All of the new resources are identified and perfectly functional.
I have to say the Mac system is very high quality and well thought out. The internal quality is just as good as the external quality.
Jeff
With the standard resources, the Mac performed better than any computer I have ever owned. Startup time to actual work is roughly 20 seconds. Even with multiple tasks running, it blazed through everything. I still felt that the storage capacity was a little low.
I found a Seagate Momomentus 320 hard drive with 7200 rpm spindle speed with a decent price at Newegg. Knowing that I would be inside the machine, I opted to purchase 4 gigs of ram. I chose the Kensington Hyper that had the best specs available. Both the ram and the hard drive came to about $220, less than half if I had purchased the same thing already installed at BestBuy. The CPU with the pre-installed system was a little faster but probably insignificant.
As background, I expected to install VMWare Fusion 3 and a licensed copy of Win XP that I had on the shelf. I thought the extra resources would be beneficial.
I found a couple of videos on YouTube that covers hard drive and ram installation. You can view one here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoHNcjCyAvU. There is a link to the other one there as well. They are excellent videos produced by OWC.
As long as you have a quality tiny phillips head screw driver and the tint torx screw drive it is a simple procedure. Just a bunch of screws. One note: the three long screws for the case and all four of the torx mounting screws on the hard drive had blue semi-permanent LockTite compound on them. You need a good screw driver and careful technique to remove and replace them with stripping the heads.
I had everything swapped out and back in place in less than half an hour. It was now time to reinstall the operating system and the changes I had made along with the software I installed. I had been using Apple Time Machine backup software, saving to an external Seagate USB hard drive. The instructions stated to plug in the backup disk and insert the OS X install disk and then select restore from the drop down utility menu. I followed the directions and about an hour later I had a completely restored system. Everything was just like it was prior to the hard drive transplant.
WaHoo!!! I have never had an easier to use back up system. The only thing that was amiss was the Mysql passwords. The passwords were gone. The databases were there but there was no password protection. I reset the passwords and everything was perfect!
All of the new resources are identified and perfectly functional.
I have to say the Mac system is very high quality and well thought out. The internal quality is just as good as the external quality.
Jeff