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.

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