What are the possible upgrade's for a 17 inch macbook pro late 2011?

Yes, SSD and RAM (if you have only bare bones) are the single most significant, easy upgrades for any Mac or Win PC and for those who wont go beyond Twitter and Netflix that will do. On a MacBook/Pro used for any kind of production or creative, it will not suffice as your performance is already negated by the form factor. Try running Adobe CS suite or compressing video on a stock MacBook out of the shop. Buy yourself a pack of cards for the down time. Or a copy of War and Peace.

With a little technical optimisation you can release additional performance, avoid the spinning ball and kernel panics to boot. I work on a MacBookPro every day as a web / graphic designer. Multiple apps and browsers open at once. I don't crash, have stalls or need to reboot.

And bear in mind, if your OS is developing an issue(s), it wont matter what hardware upgrades you make.

Peace.

To add from experience working on the same Mac daily (still in 2017).

- The SSD does not have to be large if you are on a budget. The critical elements are to fresh reformat the SSD, and put your OS and applications on this (fast access) drive. In my case 240GB is sufficient in the optical bay. Make sure its a good brand of drive and caddy as you don't want failures on your primary drive.

- SSDs are getting better in 2017, but they were / are not designed for heavy data use and need a good deal of breathing (free) space to maintain there performance over time. I keep approx 40% of mine clear and its an OWC so does not need any additional TRIM support for optimisation
- Your user account and data then go on the traditional SATA HDD. There is a procedure (Google) for this through a hidden option in the System Preferences / Users & Groups.

- You can improve the Apple shipped HDD as Kappy suggests but again, being old school, don't go over the top with a 10,000 RPM extreme option. There is a reason Apple ships 5400 RPM drives and its longevity and reliability which as a professional is the trade off. I have a WD Black 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB cache and its read / write speeds are (fast) enough.
- RAM, make sure it's good quality like Kingston or Crucial as failures can be intermittent and frustrating. Seat it well. Apple OS does a hardware test on startup so go to Apple / About This Mac to check both chips have loaded to their full extent. The Mac can run with one bay failing so don't assume its all OK.

- Graphics card, the built in 1GB dedicated card (available when plugged into power) I find more than adequate for the built in HD 17" screen and I run an external 28" widescreen HP off of this with Adobe CS 6 / Cloud no issues.

Advanced
Firstly, DONT BOTHER with any CPU / chip hacking - the i7 already has built in optimisation and you will more than likely do more harm than good. Also, appreciate that this is a mobile computer and by default Apple have balanced against battery life, heat and noise so be pragmatic. Quad i7 processor or not, this Mac will never run as fast as the equivalent iMac or tower. It's not designed to do this although this particular model has some workstation capacity (like the dedicated graphics card beyond the on board GPU).

I boot in approx' 5 seconds and I rarely have any conflicts / crashes. If you are happy to go under the hood OS / data wise there are a host of things you can do to improve the real world performance. Always create a backup clone of your OS and data first of course.

You can Google this but the highlights are:

1) Make sure your OS is matched to this hardware.
Notice I didn't say update to the latest OS. I run 10.8 primarily which is stable and released circa the time period of the Mac. The latest OS will offer new function and iOS integration but in some cases may lower performance particularly if its an 'upgrade' via software update. Do you really need this stuff? If you do decide to update than perform a wipe, clean install to ensure an optimised installation. Software Update in its attempts to maintain existing settings and software will compromise.

2) Run Intel native applications with latest stable patch
In 10.7 and above this shouldn't be an issue as Rosetta and PPC apps are officially unsupported, however, this Mac can run your older PPC apps with a mod (Upgrading to 10.7 and above, don't forget Rosetta!) Only run these when you need them and then quit out.

3) FONTS

Whilst wonderful things there are far too many stock in your system folder and they load whenever you launch an app sapping your RAM and performance. Professional users reduce the system fonts to the absolute core required by the OS and use an application to open and close fonts as required so...

- Ditch Apple Font Book (as in delete it) and use a professional manager. I use Linotype Font Explorer Pro. Your Mac comes with too many fonts as it is and FB is not designed to manage them from a performance point of view, either speed or conflicts. If you add additional 3rd party Fonts (I have approx 8,000) it will likely start to glitch, crash and slow down the Mac, particularly when opening applications.

)

You can increase the RAM up to:

You could replace the HDD with a larger and faster HDD, an SSD, or an SSD and an HDD in place of the optical drive. You cannot upgrade any other hardware.

Visit OWC for more on RAM, SSDs, and see if they have a DataDoubler for your model. Other vendors for RAM are DataMem and Crucial.com.

As an addendum to Kappy's correct advice, you can install 1600 MHz RAM instead of the 1333 MHz RAM which would result in a modest performance increase:

http://blog.macsales.com/14262-boost-2011-mbp-performance-with-1600mhz-ram

I too have a 17" late 2011 MBP with 16 GB RAM and a 960 GB SSD. I am still satisfied, that the newer retina MBPs are not an attraction for my needs.

Ciao.

Increase Ram only with the exact specs, macs are sensitive about that. The bus speed determines the speed and not the Ram specs. It may be that in this particular mac a Ram spec of 1600MHz will not cause issues, but it will not increase the speed over the bus speed. May be OWC shop does not have any 1333MHz available anymore. Then find it on the Crucial store.

For latest OS versions 8 GB is better than 4GB, and a cheap solution.

When you really want more speed, replace the HDD with a SSD, but that is more expensive, if your HDD is still alive and kicking you can place that one in the place of the DvD reader (with a "datadoubler").

All as Kappy suggested.

Got cut off in the outage 🙂

4) Turn off process you don't use - recommended
By default and after application installation various processes will be running in the background of your OS. Launch Activity Monitor (in your Applications / Utilities folder) to view these - you may be shocked. Go through these and turn off the ones you using - many will have check boxes to control this under System Preferences and / or are available through Terminal. You don't have to be pedantic about this, but logic suggests it makes sense. Would you have lights on in every room of your house if you are sat in the living room for the evening?

Example: Dashboard (mini apps deck). Why have it running taking up ram? Bluetooth - if you use a wired mouse and keyboard like we old fellas, this can turn off. Firewire, Dock animations, network printer sharing... the list goes on.

5) Remove bloatware and applications you never use - recommended

By default many things are provided with your Mac you don't need, like language kits for every country in the world (about 8GB), language support fonts, legacy support etc. A little research online will provide a shortlist of what can be safely removed and I do this on every first installation - provides a much lighter, nimble system and frees up disc space.

Best wishes.

In my own experience, the difference between using a Fusion drive versus SSD is almost imperceptible. I was disappointed when I upgraded from Fusion to SSD for this reason, but I'm happy my computer runs much cooler now, because a mechanical HDD generates quite a bit of heat. Heat is the biggest killer of electronic equipment, bar none.

Which brings me to the second "upgrade" you should make ASAP. Replace the thermal paste for your heat sink. Especially if you plan to do gaming or other CPU/GPU intensive tasks. Apple is notorious for using cheap paste and not applying it properly. Thermal paste should normally be replaced every 2-3 years anyway. Long-life paste is available if you plan to keep your computer for many years to come.

Lastly, you can replace the Bluetooth board to bring you up to 4.0. Unfortunately, Apple does not recognize the board in regard to Continuity or Apple Watch unlock functionality. There are tweaks available to enable Continuity up to Sierra, but High Sierra is still problematic.

I hope this helps.

"don't bother with using faster speed RAM, in use there is little to no difference."

indeed, it makes no difference at all, the speed is determined by the bus, not the the Ram speed.

Ram other than the specs may cause issues, especially on older macs.

as Ogel says, Ciao

Lex

Replace the HDD with an SSD and increase RAM to the max (16GB) don't bother with using faster speed RAM, in use there is little to no difference.

All that and more is much faster with a SSD. 😁