R@SH@

Q: Late 2011 MBP upgrade

Hi everyone,
this is my first time in the Apple Support Community. I am using a late 2011 15 inch MBP. When i got it, it was working fine and real fast, however, over the years, it got slow and now it is of turtle speed. The specs of my MBP is 2.2 GHz intel core i7, 4GB 1333 DDR3 and 500GB HD. I want to upgrade the memory and want to put 16GB. I contacted Apple store, they told me that late 2011 MBP has slots for 8GB only, 4GB and 4GB. Can i still upgrade my memory to 16GB?
I also want to install SSD.
it would be great if you guys could provide me with the information. And which brand SSD and RAM would be better for late 2011 MBP.

 

Thanks

MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on May 16, 2014 10:10 PM

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Q: Late 2011 MBP upgrade

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  • by Kappy,Solvedanswer

    Kappy Kappy May 16, 2014 10:14 PM in response to R@SH@
    Level 10 (271,691 points)
    Desktops
    May 16, 2014 10:14 PM in response to R@SH@

    You can install:

     

    Maximum Memory16 GB (Actual) 8 GB (Apple)
    Memory Slots2 - 204-pin PC-10600 (1333 MHz) DDR3 SO-DIMM

     

    As for an SSD I recommend using one from OWC. They will provide tools and tutorials.

     

    Things You Can Do To Resolve Slow Downs

     

    If your computer seems to be running slower here are some things you can do:

     

    Start with visits to:     OS X Maintenance - MacAttorney;

                                      The X Lab: The X-FAQs;

                                      The Safe Mac » Mac Performance Guide;

                                      The Safe Mac » The myth of the dirty Mac;

                                      Mac maintenance Quick Assist.

     

    Boot into Safe Mode then repair your hard drive and permissions:

     

    Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions Pre-Lion

     

    Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list.  In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive.  If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.

     

    Repair the Hard Drive - Lion/Mountain Lion/Mavericks

     

    Boot to the Recovery HD:

     

    Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the COMMAND and R keys until the Utilites Menu screen appears. Alternatively, restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager screen appears. Select the Recovery HD disk icon and click on the arrow button below.

     

    When the recovery menu appears select Disk Utility. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list.  In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive.  If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported, then click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the main menu. Select Restart from the Apple menu.

     

    Restart your computer normally and see if this has helped any. Next do some maintenance:

     

    For situations Disk Utility cannot handle the best third-party utility is Disk Warrior;  DW only fixes problems with the disk directory, but most disk problems are caused by directory corruption; Disk Warrior 4.x is now Intel Mac compatible.

     

    Note: Alsoft ships DW on a bootable DVD that will startup Macs running Snow Leopard or earlier. It cannot start Macs that came with Lion or later pre-installed, however, DW will work on those models.

     

    Suggestions for OS X Maintenance

     

    OS X performs certain maintenance functions that are scheduled to occur on a daily, weekly, or monthly period. The maintenance scripts run in the early AM only if the computer is turned on 24/7 (no sleep.) If this isn't the case, then an excellent solution is to download and install a shareware utility such as Macaroni, JAW PseudoAnacron, or Anacron that will automate the maintenance activity regardless of whether the computer is turned off or asleep.  Dependence upon third-party utilities to run the periodic maintenance scripts was significantly reduced since Tiger.  These utilities have limited or no functionality with Snow Leopard or later and should not be installed.

     

    OS X automatically defragments files less than 20 MBs in size, so unless you have a disk full of very large files there's little need for defragmenting the hard drive.

     

    Helpful Links Regarding Malware Protection

     

    An excellent link to read is Tom Reed's Mac Malware Guide.

    Also, visit The XLab FAQs and read Detecting and avoiding malware and spyware.

    See these Apple articles:

     

              Mac OS X Snow Leopard and malware detection

              OS X Lion- Protect your Mac from malware

              OS X Mountain Lion- Protect your Mac from malware

              About file quarantine in OS X

     

    If you require anti-virus protection I recommend using VirusBarrier Express 1.1.6 or Dr.Web Light both from the App Store. They're both free, and since they're from the App Store, they won't destabilize the system. (Thank you to Thomas Reed for these recommendations.)

     

    Troubleshooting Applications

     

    I recommend downloading a utility such as TinkerTool System, OnyX, Mavericks Cache Cleaner, or Cocktail that you can use for removing old log files and archives, clearing caches, etc. Corrupted cache, log, or temporary files can cause application or OS X crashes as well as kernel panics.

     

    If you have Snow Leopard or Leopard, then for similar repairs install the freeware utility Applejack.  If you cannot start up in OS X, you may be able to start in single-user mode from which you can run Applejack to do a whole set of repair and maintenance routines from the command line.  Note that AppleJack 1.5 is required for Leopard. AppleJack 1.6 is compatible with Snow Leopard. Applejack does not work with Lion and later.

     

    Basic Backup

     

    For some people Time Machine will be more than adequate. Time Machine is part of OS X. There are two components:

     

    1. A Time Machine preferences panel as part of System Preferences;

    2. A Time Machine application located in the Applications folder. It is

        used to manage backups and to restore backups. Time Machine

        requires a backup drive that is at least twice the capacity of the

        drive being backed up.

     

    Alternatively, get an external drive at least equal in size to the internal hard drive and make (and maintain) a bootable clone/backup. You can make a bootable clone using the Restore option of Disk Utility. You can also make and maintain clones with good backup software. My personal recommendations are (order is not significant):

     

      1. Carbon Copy Cloner

      2. Get Backup

      3. Deja Vu

      4. SuperDuper!

      5. Synk Pro

      6. Tri-Backup

     

    Visit The XLab FAQs and read the FAQ on backup and restore.  Also read How to Back Up and Restore Your Files. For help with using Time Machine visit Pondini's Time Machine FAQ for help with all things Time Machine.

     

    Referenced software can be found at MacUpdate.

     

    Additional Hints

     

    Be sure you have an adequate amount of RAM installed for the number of applications you run concurrently. Be sure you leave a minimum of 10% of the hard drive's capacity as free space.

     

    Add more RAM. If your computer has less than 2 GBs of RAM and you are using OS X Leopard or later, then you can do with more RAM. Snow Leopard and Lion work much better with 4 GBs of RAM than their system minimums. The more concurrent applications you tend to use the more RAM you should have.

     

    Always maintain at least 15 GBs or 10% of your hard drive's capacity as free space, whichever is greater. OS X is frequently accessing your hard drive, so providing adequate free space will keep things from slowing down.

     

    Check for applications that may be hogging the CPU:

     

    Pre-Mavericks

     

    Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder.  Select All Processes from the Processes dropdown menu.  Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order.  If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time (>=70,) then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar.  Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process.  See if that helps.  Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.

     

    Mavericks and later

     

    Open Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder.  Select All Processes from the View menu.  Click on the CPU tab in the toolbar. Click twice on the CPU% column header to display in descending order.  If you find a process using a large amount of CPU time (>=70,) then select the process and click on the Quit icon in the toolbar.  Click on the Force Quit button to kill the process.  See if that helps.  Be sure to note the name of the runaway process so you can track down the cause of the problem.

     

    Often this problem occurs because of a corrupted cache or preferences file or an attempt to write to a corrupted log file.

  • by R@SH@,

    R@SH@ R@SH@ May 16, 2014 10:31 PM in response to R@SH@
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 16, 2014 10:31 PM in response to R@SH@

    Thanks a lot.
    I shall get my MBP upgraded ASAP.
    about the Basic Back up, can i have the same iphoto(with the photos) and itunes when i upgrade to SSD by using Carbon Copy Cloner? by that I mean, I will have the same system but HD would be replaced by SSD.

  • by Kappy,Helpful

    Kappy Kappy May 16, 2014 10:35 PM in response to R@SH@
    Level 10 (271,691 points)
    Desktops
    May 16, 2014 10:35 PM in response to R@SH@

    Sure. Here's my basic approach which you can modify per your needs:

     

    How to replace or upgrade a drive in a laptop

     

    Step One: Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions

     

    Boot from your OS X Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Installer menu (Utilities menu for Tiger, Leopard or Snow Leopard.) After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list.  In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive.  If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.

     

    If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.

     

    Step Two: Remove the old drive and install the new drive.  Place the old drive in an external USB enclosure.  You can buy one at OWC who is also a good vendor for drives.

     

    Step Three: Boot from the external drive.  Restart the computer and after the chime press and hold down the OPTION key until the boot manager appears.  Select the icon for the external drive then click on the downward pointing arrow button.

     

    Step Four: New Hard Drive Preparation

     

      1. Open Disk Utility in your Utilities folder.

     

      2. After DU loads select your new hard drive (this is the entry with the

          mfgr.'s ID and size) from the left side list. Note the SMART status of

          the drive in DU's status area.  If it does not say "Verified" then the drive

          is failing or has failed and will need replacing.  Otherwise, click on the

          Partition tab in the DU main window.

     

      3. Under the Volume Scheme heading set the number of partitions from

          the drop down menu to one. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended

          (Journaled.) Click on the Options button, set the partition scheme to

          GUID  then click on the OK button. Click on the Partition button and

          wait until the process has completed.

     

      4. Select the volume you just created (this is the sub-entry under the

          drive entry) from the left side list. Click on the Erase tab in the DU main

          window.

     

      5. Set the format type to Mac OS Extended (Journaled.) Click on the

          Options button, check the button for Zero Data and click on OK to

          return to the Erase window.

     

      6. Click on the Erase button. The format process can take up to several

          hours depending upon the drive size.

     

    Step Five: Clone the old drive to the new drive

     

      1. Open Disk Utility from the Utilities folder.

      2. Select the destination volume from the left side list.

      3. Click on the Restore tab in the DU main window.

      4. Check the box labeled Erase destination.

      5. Select the destination volume from the left side list and drag it to the

          Destination entry field.

      6. Select the source volume from the left side list and drag it to the

          Source entry field.

      7. Double-check you got it right, then click on the Restore button.

     

    Destination means the new internal drive. Source means the old external drive.

     

    Step Six: Open the Startup Disk preferences and select the new internal volume.  Click on the Restart button.  You should boot from the new drive.  Eject the external drive and disconnect it from the computer.

  • by thomas_r.,

    thomas_r. thomas_r. May 17, 2014 3:01 AM in response to R@SH@
    Level 7 (30,929 points)
    Mac OS X
    May 17, 2014 3:01 AM in response to R@SH@

    Before you spend a bunch of money to upgrade your system, try to solve the performance issues. Unless you're really pushing your system very hard, it's unlikely the problems you're seeing are due to insufficient RAM or a slow hard drive. Thus, it's entirely possible that you may throw a lot of money at these upgrades, then restore your system from a backup, only to find that your computer is still slow!

     

    Try the suggestions in my Mac Performance Guide first. If the "Check the RAM" section there indicates you're having memory-related problems, then you'll need to upgrade the RAM... if not, then upgrading the RAM is a complete waste of money.

     

    (Fair disclosure: The Safe Mac is my site, and contains a Donate button, so I may receive compensation for providing links to The Safe Mac. Donations are not required.)