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Would you upgrade a mid 2010 13"? Help :)

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0186279

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Nov 5, 2009
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I'm still rocking my 2010 13" (2.4) with 4gb and 250gb HDD. Until I installed Yosemite I had little to no problems short of my battery slowly failing on me, which is easily replaceable. Then I installed Yosemite and realized I definitely need to upgrade to 8gb of RAM, as things have started getting pretty sluggish.

So I'm considering upping it to 8gb as well as replacing the battery and throwing an SSD in the CD drive. However, I figure I'm looking at upwards of $400-$500 to do this and I really can't tell if it's worth it at that point. With a 2.4 C2D and GeForce 320m and I just holding myself back? I use my laptop pretty casually: Word processing, iTunes, internet, storing photos, light photo editing, light photoshop and the occasional older game.

I'm torn between upgrading or saving another $600 or so and getting a new MBP. This laptop has been good to me though and something in me wants to just keep it until the wheels fall off haha.

Thoughts?
 
personally with what you do you won't need much power at all. But Apple is slowly but surely trying cut support on older models, if I were you I would sell your current model and buy a macbook you would save yourself the trouble.
 
ozreth said:
So I'm considering upping it to 8gb as well as replacing the battery and throwing an SSD in the CD drive. However, I figure I'm looking at upwards of $400-$500 to do this and I really can't tell if it's worth it at that point.
Click to expand...
Where are you getting that figure from? 8 GB of RAM should only cost around $50 and a smaller SSD plus drive bay shouldn't be that much either.
 
I figured $100 for the new battery, $200 for an SSD, and I thought the RAM would cost me around $100. All with tax and shipping included of course. That being said I haven't looked at the prices of these things for a few years now.
 
If I were you I would roll back to Mavericks. Like you I installed Yosemite and felt it was slow, sluggish, unresponsive, and downright just terrible on this hardware. I decided to max the RAM (8GB), replace my battery, and get an SSD and guess what? It still ran like junk. I imagine its the CPU and GPU bottlenecking it on 10.10 but when I decided to wipe the drive and reinstall Mavericks it began to run beautifully again. I guess what I am trying to say is if you want to run Yosemite, get a new machine, otherwise roll back to Mavericks unless you can put up with a major slowdown for very little gain in terms of new features. Like the others are saying, the upgrades do not cost nearly as much as you think, think with the battery, RAM, and SSD it cost me about $200 bucks in the end, just look out for sales and if you have a Microcenter in your area check out their SSD prices. The hardware upgrade does make even Mavericks run great so I do still highly recommend it, just avoid Yosemite. That said I am going to make a time machine backup when 10.11 comes out and give that a shot and see how it performs!
 
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slyr114 said:
If I were you I would roll back to Mavericks. Like you I installed Yosemite and felt it was slow, sluggish, unresponsive, and downright just terrible on this hardware. I decided to max the RAM (8GB), replace my battery, and get an SSD and guess what? It still ran like junk. I imagine its the CPU and GPU bottlenecking it on 10.10 but when I decided to wipe the drive and reinstall Mavericks it began to run beautifully again. I guess what I am trying to say is if you want to run Yosemite, get a new machine, otherwise roll back to Mavericks unless you can put up with a major slowdown for very little gain in terms of new features. Like the others are saying, the upgrades do not cost nearly as much as you think, think with the battery, RAM, and SSD it cost me about $200 bucks in the end, just look out for sales and if you have a Microcenter in your area check out their SSD prices. The hardware upgrade does make even Mavericks run great so I do still highly recommend it, just avoid Yosemite. That said I am going to make a time machine backup when 10.11 comes out and give that a shot and see how it performs!
Click to expand...

Just want to put my 2cents in if you do have a microcenter near by they also price match so make sure you find what you are looking for and compare prices
 
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Why not just put a 120G 850evo in it for $60 and see if that makes you happy. If that works for you then upgrade the rest of not you now have an external drive.
 
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slyr114 said:
If I were you I would roll back to Mavericks. Like you I installed Yosemite and felt it was slow, sluggish, unresponsive, and downright just terrible on this hardware. I decided to max the RAM (8GB), replace my battery, and get an SSD and guess what? It still ran like junk. I imagine its the CPU and GPU bottlenecking it on 10.10 but when I decided to wipe the drive and reinstall Mavericks it began to run beautifully again. I guess what I am trying to say is if you want to run Yosemite, get a new machine, otherwise roll back to Mavericks unless you can put up with a major slowdown for very little gain in terms of new features. Like the others are saying, the upgrades do not cost nearly as much as you think, think with the battery, RAM, and SSD it cost me about $200 bucks in the end, just look out for sales and if you have a Microcenter in your area check out their SSD prices. The hardware upgrade does make even Mavericks run great so I do still highly recommend it, just avoid Yosemite. That said I am going to make a time machine backup when 10.11 comes out and give that a shot and see how it performs!
Click to expand...

Now I'm wondering if other people have had this issue? If it is just my CPU that cant handle the new OS then I'm screwed either way. Probably gonna try an SSD and see what happens, just trying to get some other perspectives in the meantime...
 
ozreth said:
Now I'm wondering if other people have had this issue? If it is just my CPU that cant handle the new OS then I'm screwed either way. Probably gonna try an SSD and see what happens, just trying to get some other perspectives in the meantime...
Click to expand...

Apple is slowly phasing out people with older models to make them buy new machines.
 
ozreth said:
Now I'm wondering if other people have had this issue? If it is just my CPU that cant handle the new OS then I'm screwed either way. Probably gonna try an SSD and see what happens, just trying to get some other perspectives in the meantime...
Click to expand...
I have Yosemite on my mid-2010 white MacBook which has almost the exact same hardware as your MBP, and it runs Yosemite just fine. It helps if you turn off transparency though, since it does tax your system quite a bit.
 
Meister said:
Nothing you do requires 8gb ram. Put in a small ssd and enjoy!
Click to expand...

For such a small investment, testing out your machine with a SSD will be eye opening. For that effort, you should also then max out the RAM which doesn't cost very much either.

Then you'll have a basis to make any future decison IMHO.
 
I agree with most of the posts, getting a small SSD first and seeing if you like it would be a good first step, but if you have plans to buy a macbook soon, you might wanna consider that the macbooks no longer accept the SATA SSDs and you might end up using it as external. SATA SSDs in external enclosures are still cool, but you'll need to invest again for your laptop main drive.
 
From the sounds of it, you don't need a new laptop so hang on to it until the wheels fall off. An SSD is the way to go.
 
From crucial (for me, this has been the best bang-for-the-buck for a while:)
8GB kit : $64.
250GB SSD: $93.
Battery (Amazon): 65.

Total: 222

You could do this $23 cheaper if you can get by with a 120GB SSD, but that might be cutting it too tight.
Shipping varies. Usually free from crucial, amazon could be free depending on your seller and your prime-ness.

Tools required:
Torx (6 or 8, I forget which). $2
Phillips (0). $2
A USB enclosure or dock for the drive if you plan to transfer data. If you have a time machine backup or CCC clone already, no need. $15

I'm assuming US.
 
Romanesq said:
For such a small investment, testing out your machine with a SSD will be eye opening. For that effort, you should also then max out the RAM which doesn't cost very much either.

Then you'll have a basis to make any future decison IMHO.
Click to expand...

actually DDR2 is pretty expensive more expensive than ddr3
 
ApolloBoy said:
Well considering he's going to be opening up the machine anyway to put in an SSD, why not kill two birds with one stone?
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Yes, the great effort of unscrewing a couple of screws :rolleyes:

He doesn't need a ram upgrade right now and can always upgrade it later.
Suggesting to buy more ram for an old, upgradeable computer for "future proofing" is idiotic.
 
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