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How would you upgrade my MacBook Pro 15" to maximize performance? No dollar limit.

I love my MCB, but am not technical.

Spend my money, theoretically -- If you had an unlimited budget to upgrade this system to make it fast and more efficient, what would you buy or do to it?

I'm deciding if I should scrap it and get a new MacBook Pro 13" instead. I like my MCB 15", but it seems to be getting hung up alot with the spinning rainbow, everyday apps freezing or crashing, and just slow when I have multiple windows open in Safari and Firefox at same time. I realize that the sites I browse to are more graphic intensive than they were when I got the MCB in 2008, but I'm wondering if it would be worthwhile to spend some $$$ to upgrade whatever I can and save my pennies for a newer Mac in a year or two. Safari and Mail crash or get hung a lot, Photo Booth folder is mysteriously empty,

So should I expect to be able to get substantial performance improvement (speed, multi-tasking) if I upgrade whatever is upgradable?

I surf using multiple browsers and open many tabs and mail with numerous accounts and magicjack, ocassionally use iweb, pages, text, calendar, low intensity games.

Thanks for any advice and recommendations and thoughts. I'd probably get the Genius Bar to install upgrades.

MacBook Pro 15"

2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

2 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

L2 Cache 3 MB

Bus Speed 800 MHZ

OSX 10.5.8

HD 186 GB (137 used)

I back up Time Machine to WD My Passport 1TB

GeForce 8600M GT:

Chipset Model: GeForce 8600M GT

Type: Display

Bus: PCIe

PCIe Lane Width: x4

VRAM (Total): 256 MB

Vendor: NVIDIA (0x10de)

Device ID: 0x0407

Revision ID: 0x00a1

ROM Revision: 3212

Intel ICH8-M AHCI:

Vendor: Intel

Product: ICH8-M AHCI

Speed: 1.5 Gigabit

Description: AHCI Version 1.10 Supported

USB Bus:

Host Controller Location: Built In USB

Host Controller Driver: AppleUSBUHCI

PCI Device ID: 0x2834

PCI Revision ID: 0x0003

PCI Vendor ID: 0x8086

Bus Number: 0x1a

BRCM2046 Hub:

Product ID: 0x4500

Vendor ID: 0x0a5c (Broadcom Corp.)

Version: 1.00

Speed: Up to 12 Mb/sec

Manufacturer: Apple Inc.

Location ID: 0x1a100000

Current Available (mA): 500

Current Required (mA): 0

Also -- it had a couple of soft drops to floor and one medium intensity drop, always on carpet. so the case (not unibody) is dented on the sides with ports. All "seem" to work fine except right side USB; looks pushed in and angled, and the plastic trim that fills in space connecting flat top of typing surface to bottom cover has a 4" piece cracked off (kind of looks like where grout would go). Devices work but if you move the wire it's power filckers off and on. Have never used firewire or thunderbolt ports on this.

I would like more USB port options (maybe a high grade extendor???) for Logitech laptop cooler, external HD, VOIP device, wired mouse, wired keyboard (I prefer wired).

Thanks again.

MacBook Pro, Mac OS X (10.5.8)

Posted on Jul 19, 2012 9:06 AM

16 replies

Nov 24, 2012 5:05 AM in response to Miss Mercury

Hardware wise, the standard RAM and SSD upgrade path will make the biggest improvement. Be careful though; your Mac only supports quite a slow link speed with the hard drive (1.5 gigabit). This is ~187.5MBps. I think this is SATA 1. SATA 3 is the standard now (6Gbps) and most recent SSDs cater for this, boasting 500-600MBps speeds which are in fact far faster than what your computer supports. It doesn't matter because your Mac will be compatible with the drives and just not use the extra speed (all versions of SATA are backwards compatible), but just don't expect those amazing advertised speeds.

A lot of the beach balls and hangs you are getting are due to the RAM though. What's happening is your Mac runs out of RAM when you have a couple of program opens and so it moves stuff onto the hard drive into 'virtual RAM'. The problem is that the hard drive is epically slow in comparison to speedy RAM, and so putting RAM files onto it results in two things: slow performance (the result of this virtual RAM being used) and beachballs (which occur as the Mac moves stuff around or gets caught on a sticky process)

For a more immediate speed fix, your better off going down the software route though. Try and remove some clutter from your drive (the less, the better really). Remove as many start up items, dashboard widgets, menu bar items, dock items and desktop files/icons as you can. Update your apps. Go to Safari, click the name in the menu bar and click 'reset' (this also deletes saved passwords, etc.). If you're running a heap of plugins, get rid of them too. There are some usefull apps out there to help out too. Try OnyX, Tinkertool, Monolingual and AppCleaner (all free and on the internet). With Onyx, just go to the Automation pane, select all the boxes and click run. Don't go fossicking around with some of the other stuff unless you think you know what you're doing though.Tinkertool can save CPU and GPU by removing some of that UI eye candy. Monolingual removes all the languages you don't need. AppCleaner deletes apps AND related files, not merely the apps themselves as 'move to trash' does.

All that said, a reinstall of OS X never goes amiss either.

How would you upgrade my MacBook Pro 15" to maximize performance? No dollar limit.