Upgrading Your MacBook

1309 days ago in Articles, Contributors by Brent | 3 Comments

This is a guest article by Emma Best from laptopical.com, where they review the best laptop computers and write unbiased Mac book reviews .

Now that the new MacBooks are out just getting a new one might just be too tempting, but if you decide on keeping your old one there are a couple of upgrades you can do on the already powerful Intel MacBook.

What Can Be Upgraded on My MacBook?

Since Apple moved to Intel hardware, the inside of a MacBook is very similar to the inside of any Windows-based laptop. Most of the components follow industry standards, and there’s no need to buy special components that are “designed for Mac” – this is just a gimmick as far as the interior workings of your laptop are concerned. Components you can upgrade with standard replacements include RAM memory and hard drive. Both of these are located under the battery slot underneath your laptop.

Upgrading the Hard Drive

The hard drive is often the weakest link in a laptop, and you can gain a significant performance boost by upgrading it to a faster hard drive or a solid state drive (SSD). Getting more storage space is also a huge advantage of course, as it allows you to store more music, movies, games and other applications.

The MacBook uses regular 2.5” (laptop size) serial-ATA hard drives that you can buy at almost any computer retailer. Before you replace the drive, make sure you backup all of the content on your current drive.

Upgrading RAM

Most laptops including the MacBook only have two memory slots, and upgrading the amount of RAM memory often means that you unfortunately have to replace both of the memory modules. Newer MacBooks can handle up to 4 GB of RAM, and the modules you need are called DDR2 SO-DIMM (note: the latest aluminum MacBooks use DDR3). In order to max out your RAM you need 2 sticks of 2 GB each.

Be Careful

If you have little to no experience with computers, let a professional handle all of your upgrades.

Bob

Even before Apple moved to Intel powered machines, their laptops used industry standard hard drives and memory. Sure certain machines may have been a bit more picky about memory specs, but that's also true in the Windows world as well.
http://photograview.com Greg Wilker

Hey Brent,

I’m going to be getting the MBP + LED Display in a few months. I might get two LED Displays, one for my new job and one for home.

PS: I have to move on the 1-2 so I’m going to be missing Podcamp AZ this year which sucks. =/ I was really looking forward to being at DJsteen & iJustine’s wedding
Jason

The best way to do the HDD backup/upgrade is to buy yourself a SATA to USB2 enclosure. You can probably pick up a cheap one on EBay, or from your friendly independent computer spares store.

Once you're connected up to the new drive, open up Disk Utility and Restore the internal HDD to the new one. This'll be very bad if you do it the wrong way around! So be careful.

Now you can go ahead and replace the HDD with the new one, or get a mac hardware helper person to do it for you. (without the additional cost for the hours of transferring your stuff.)