I bought my macbook pro in the 2nd semester of my first year at IIT Delhi, 2009. Among the very first few who proudly owes and love flaunting it in the campus. I have had a long history of over 6 years with Windows laptops and trust me, macbook pro is way ahead of Windows laptops starting with unmatched hardware specially the touchpad and of course, the great looks and the OS. Yes, I do miss the easily available pirated windows software but hey, I'm not complaining. Macbook pro hardly EVER hangs. I spent zero hours repairing it too and use my time for well, more productive hours! 4 years now, it has hung up on me like thrice perhaps? My macbook pro which I bought from Ansal Plaza was the mid 2009 model. It is powered by Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26 Ghz, 2GB RAM and 160HDD with an external HDD for backup using Time Machine, another awesome mac app.
Honestly, Screenshot of Ningning Niumai's macbook pro it was getting painful to use the recently updated Photoshop CS3 and work on heavy image files and so finally decided to format and give it to my sister, get a brand new macbook pro for myself but oh well, she wanted a new one for herself too LOL. So much for my plans! I couldn't think of getting a dreadful Windows because of my limited budget and thus the search began.
I finally decided to upgrade to 8GB RAM and replace the DVD drive with the already installed 160GB HDD and have 128GB SSD in place of the recently moved HDD! Why SSD? Because it is so much faster than HDD. In total, I would have 160GB+128GB as the internal hard disk.
To begin the process, I needed Hard Drive Caddy Tray for Apple Unibody MacBook / MacBook Pro so I could replace the non-functional DVD drive (who uses it anyways) but it wasn't available in India and the ones available are way too expensive at Rs 2500 or more from some unknown ecommerce websites when I could get it off ebay for $10 from trusted sellers and so I ordered and waited, a month and finally it arrived!
Once I got the caddy tray, I started comparing prices at flipkart for that's the ONLY website that sells hardware these days and found the cost of RAM and SSD alarmingly high!! I drove to Nehru Place and bought two 4GB 1067 Mhz DDR3 Transcend RAM and 128GB SATA III Kingston SSD for they are the cheapest and matches my macbook pro configuration. Both the items cost me Rs 9600 and saved over Rs 1500 as per flipkart's website. Flipkart is getting way too expensive unless you are buying a pendrive or products worth Rs 500 and below! I remember wanting to buy Epson projector and found Rs 3000 cheaper at Nehru Place as compared to flipkart!!! There has been complains of many buyers about fake items too from the sellers after they shifted to market place model. No more quality control. WS Retail is still a trusted seller at flipkart though.
Watched a few youtube videos on upgrading, excited and nervous at the same time. The RAM upgrade was a child's play for I've done a dozen times before. The tricky part was carefully shown on youtube and as per the instruction, I replaced the DVD Drive with the new HDD Caddy and successfully place the old 160GB HDD in it, attached the wires so it can be used as a secondary drive. Threw away the DVD Drive happily and proceeded to place the SSD in place of the HDD recently moved. Note that the SSD and HDD are of the same size and looks the same. Thus, it was done.
Breathe holding and quietly praying that it works, I turn on my macbook pro and voila!!! I saw the newly installed RAM and SSD. It worked ☺ ☺
I began installing the Mountain Lion in the brand new 128GB SSD. It took just about 15 minutes! My macbook pro now loads in less than 10 seconds and opens Photoshop and MS Word like Notepad in Windows OS even after 6 months!! Sometimes, I would open over a 50 tabs in Chrome and it works smoothly. Yes, it is that fast. The 8GB RAM and 128GB SSD upgrade to my macbook pro is a money well spent.
Let me know if you are planning to upgrade your macbook pro or have done so already!
