MacBook Pro Model A1211

I’ve now upgraded three of these MacBook Pro model A1211 Apple Laptops with extra RAM and a faster hard drive.  I’m as pleased with the results as when I did the first upgrade!!  The performance gains have been astonishing. If you haven’t yet, read my article about the performance change before and after the upgrade in the Upgrade your Macbook Pro article.

The machine I’m writing this on was a real pig and always seemed even slower than same generation Macbooks (although I’m sure that had to be in my mind).  Now it’s snappy and responsive even running both Windows 7 in VMWare along with all the other stuff I’m doing.

This particular upgrade means going from 2 gb of RAM to 4 and swapping out the old Hitachi 160 gb 5400 rpm drive for a faster and larger Seagate 250 gb 7200 rpm drive.

The hardware upgrade is fairly easy on this model.  Just remove about 20 screws and the keyboard/trackpad assembly lifts up to expose the hard drive.  Disconnect a few cables, remove a few more screws and swap in the new HDD.  It’s of course the exact same size, just better.  Button everything back up.

One of the most recent ones need the OS installed on it from scratch so I just went about installing Snow Leopard on that one.  The second was a true upgrade and I needed to move all the data over to the new drive.  I have a USB HDD adapter that allows you to connect either a full size or laptop size HDD to the computer via a USB port.  Doing this allowed me to boot to the original HDD.  Once in the OS I used the Disk Utility to initialize and partition the new HDD.  Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy all the info onto the new drive.  Once it was complete (about one hour for 50 GB) I shutdown the Macbook, disconnected the USB HDD and booted normally into the OS.

Viola!  Full upgrade in about an hour and half.  The cost was about $150 per unit with shipping and all.  This is a small investment towards a computer that will last several more years!  My recommendation- upgrade your Macbook Pro.  Do it NOW!

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Yes, upgrade your MacBook Pro… DO IT NOW!

Of course I’m talking about the older MacBook Pro, not the new aluminum block ones.

I was always very suprised that Apple didn’t put 7200 RPM hard drives in their MacBooks.  It wasn’t a matter of them not being available and must have had more to do with their internal purchasing.  BUT after upgrading my MacBook Pro I can tell from experience that not putting the 7200 RPM drives in from the factory was a mistake.  The performance gains were phenominal!!

So I fould lots of instructions on the web about how to do it and even YouTube videos which were great.  The main trouble I had was in moving the OS and data.  After some trial and error I ended up using Carbon Copy Cloner and moving the entire old drive contents to the new drive which I had already formatted.  Anyway I’m rambling…

I ordered a 320 GB 7200 RPM HDD and a 4 GB memory kit from New Egg for under $140 with shipping.  I took extra care to benchmark prior to the upgrade using XBench (http://www.xbench.com/) and got an overall score of 108.  After the upgrades I re-ran XBench and got a score of 127!!  Nearly a 20 point gain!!  If you haven’t used XBench before you won’t realize how huge of a gain that is, but believe me- it’s HUGE.  Now my old MacBook Pro that I’ve had for over 2 years out performs the newest iMacs coming out!  My XBench results on the new iMacs can be found in another post called “Are the newest iMacs any faster?”  Oddly enough the new iMacs actually score lower than my MacBook Pro did before the upgrade.  Figure that one out…

The laptop is like a new machine!  I strongly urge you to upgrade your old MacBook Pro.  You will be so happy and giggle with delight so much that a little pee will come out.

Check back soon as I will post the XBench results from the new aluminum MacBooks.

Popularity: 38% [?]

Neo2 Laptop

Today at work I ordered a Neo2 Mobile Laptop Lab for the classroooms.  The Neo2 is an Alphasmart device and is from the same company as our reading software Accelerated Reader- Reniasance Learning.

They sent me two of these units to test and we were impressed.  I gave the unopened box to one of the the fifth grade teachers and he just ran with it, even with no training.  The run on three AA batteries for a full year so you don’t need to worry about recharging.  They’re geared directly toward education with writing in mind.  They have over 300 writing prompts built in to get kids excited about learning.  The Superintendent was excited to see this program moving forward and is looking forward to having a cart of 32 for the school to use.

Read more about them at http://www.renlearn.com/neo/ .

Popularity: 4% [?]