wow, awesome info, thank you! just ordered the tool kit and cable on amazon. my friday night will consist of watching the longhorns in the tourney along with swapping in the SSD on my old macbook!
This is a 1 stop shop for RAM and SSD upgrades. You can select your computer first and then it'll tell you what the max RAM your computer supports. https://www.macsales.com If you replace your hard drive, make sure you do a time machine backup on an external drive and then you can easily restore your computer onto the new drive. All of your data will be put back where it was and all of your applications will be just as they were. Once you replace the drive, 1) Go to the App store and download El Capitan 2) Format A USB stick as type MAC JOURNALED. Keep the default name for the format as "UNKNOWN" 3) Create an install disk out of the USB using terminal. It works great as long as you download the OS and did not move it out of the folder that it was downloaded to and if you didn't change the name of the USB stick from Unknown. If you have then you just need to edit the termainal input: sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ El\ Capitan.app --nointeraction After you have replaced the hard drive drive, turn on the computer with the USB stick plugged in and it will load the OS install. You'll need to open Disk Utility and format the new drive as Mac Journaled (it's probably FAT by default) and then install OSX onto that drive. There might be a point where it seems to freeze at 1 second left in the installation. Just give it time and it will restart. You'll then be prompted to restore via your time machine backup. I've done this a ton and it's very very easy. It can add 3 years to your computer's lifecycle. If you are intending to install Windows using bootcamp, DO NOT use disk utility to partition when setting up a new drive. Just run the bootcamp utility once OSX is backup and it will create the partition for you.
This'll work too, but how does it add 3 years to life cycle? Like the SSD upgrade or this install procedure? because on a mac I have from 08 it's working still... and I've done both types of procedures (clone and clean install with time machine). Just curious, I also am not knocking site since it might help with quick specs, but pricing.. I mean between the two I'd go samsung every time for price/performance/size. Also I'm not big on sandforce controllers still.
The RAM upgrade helps your computer keep up with the times. As software develops, the minimums for a reasonably paced computer goes up. It means that you'll have a few more years until the computer is under stocked with RAM. The move to a SSD drive decreases the likelihood of your old drive failure in the next 3 years. They also have a health monitoring protocol called "S.M.A.R.T" which can detect any possible problems. The SSD (along with the RAM but not as much) makes your computer faster. Data can be read and written to at a much faster rate and you don't get those random disk slowdowns. So it helps your computer "keep up with the times" until you have to throw it away for being too slow and drastically decreases the likelhood that your drive will die in the next 3 years. There is a RAM cap of what your computer can support though. It's a waste not to take as much advantage of it as possible.
Gotcha, I knew all this I thought you were meaning something crazy like something magical happened, hah (like 3 years exactly because...), had me curious sorry for making type all out. Yeah I do a lot of stuff on side for pc/macs (and fix anything electronic pretty much...), so you're definitely spot on about getting more life out of the system swapping stuff like this.
