2.4 i5 with ssd or 2.66 i7 with 5400 hdd

[Eggman32]

Hello all,

I've been reading through massive amounts of posts on this website, and I still can't decide which would be the better option for me.

A 2.4 i5 with a 128gb ssd is about the same price as the 2.66 i7 with the stock drive (with student discounts). I'm wondering which I would see a greater performance boost in. I'm going to be a student next year, and foresee using the notebook for word processing, presentations, music, garage band, imovie, iphoto.. Probably no games, and probably nothing like photoshop.

Going with the lower powered processor, will I see greater battery life and less heat issues as well? The only thing I'm worried about is having less drive space, but as of now I should only have about 40 gb of music/pictues/vids that I want on it. Is the 2.4 too slow a processor?

One more issue I've been looking into is the degradation of ssd's over time. I've seen some drives have special software or something that fix that, something like TRIM I think? Do these ssd's implement that?

One final question if anyone knows, how much space will OSX, and Windows 7 in addition take up in drive space?

 

[singhjeet29]

The 2.4 still flies. The i5's are no slouches. The i7's are just beasts. I would go with the SSD combo if you can survive with that space, externals are your friend, if you haven't used them before. The SSD is really fast for starting and booting applications and has reduced heat output and the i5, will improve the battery life over the i7.

unfortunately from what I'm told there is no TRIM for Mac, but the degradation is something I'd like to learn more about, I remember someone throwing out the number 10,000 cycles. I was wondering what that meant? Does that mean I could technically use 10,000*160GB (my SSD space) and it would then start to degrade?