Early Macbook upgrade advice please

[clouty]

My darling macbook works hard, and I'm continually cleaning up to keep functional. I have decided to spend about £100 on birthday upgrades, but my problem is, while I've done a lot of reading and youtube watching, I'm still not sure of the order of play. Given this mac:

A Snow Leopard upgrade disc
A Western Digital Scorpio 250GB 2.5" SATA 5400RPM hard drive
And Kingston DDR2 PC6400 SODIMM - 2 x 1GB Kit

My questions are
Is this the right kit?
What is the order of play?

I have the original Tiger reinstall discs.

I hope this makes sense. I'm new to the world of upgrading computers, but I have the phillips 00 and the torx bits, half a brain and not a lot of cash.

 

[tallchris]

I's say get the ram and snow leopard, should cost you about £40-50. I'm no expert with computers but I found upgrading both easy.

Wouldn't bother with a Hard drive unless you need the extra space?

If you have gone this long with tiger though you might want to consider saving your money and waiting for Lion to come out (probably be out sometime between now and september). Not sure if you'll be able to go straight from tiger to lion though, would have though it possible though. Snow Leopard is pretty cheap though.

 

[RafaelT]

As the last poster said with Lion being released in the very near future you may want to hold off from buying Snow Leopard.

The other stuff sounds good.

 

[clouty]

Thanks, tallchris, but what I need to know is, do I change the memory (and the hard drive, I do need the space) and then install Snow Leopard, or do I install Snow Leopard and then change the hardware? Are there any issues doing it all at once? It'll be a clean install, I can clone my existing hardrive onto my external hd.

I need to upgrade the o/s now, and Lion will be out - when? Then there's the bugs you get in a brand new o/s, so it's Snow Leopard, soon, for me.

ETA I've just realized I'm being stupid. Of course I change the hardware, it will need the o/s installing after that whatever was on before. Of course. Dur.

Am I right?

 

[RafaelT]

We will probably know in about 2 hours when they will be releasing Lion. At least wait until we know the date to make the decision.

 

[clouty]

For the sake of those that might find this thread, and have the same questions as I did, I'd like to report success, and wrinkles in the process. Yay, I have what feels like a brand new computer!

I decided to pass for now on the new hard drive. The pair of I gig RAM modules were a doddle to install, and worked first time. I came across a couple of videos on You Tube that together gave all the necessary info: this one and this one which reminds you not to wear wool, and ground yourself first. I used to magnetise mainsprings on wind up watches.

Clean installing Snow Leopard (I'd already bought it) had a little confusion to start with. One set of instructions said hold down control (apple?) and another said hold down 'c' which could mean control or the letter c when the chime sounds on boot-up ... Well, it turned out for me that it worked with the letter C. FWIW.

Install took ages, at least dinner and a movie, and then reinstalling iLife 9 from my original disks hung at two minutes to go for hours. So the only way out of that was to hold down the power button until the computer shut down. Aaarrghh. But when I booted up again, all the iLife apps were there, and seem to be working ok. Go figure - but if it works, don't knock it. Or has something awful taken place beneath the keyboard?

Three days on, all is well. Nice fresh downloads of Open Office, Skype, iStat Nano and Onyx runs now too. I think.. it's all good

 

[ResPublica]

Such a big upgrade kind of gives you a 'new' Mac; I have done something similar with my sisters Mac mini (from 512MB RAM to 2GB, from Tiger to Snow Leopard). It's simply not the same computer.

You might want to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion (10.7) when it's released in July. You'll be able to download it from the Mac App Store for 29,99 dollars and it has some great new functions. However, for someone who has up to now used Tiger and doesn't have too much cash, it's probably not worth it.

Anyway, enjoy your 'new' Mac!

 

[clouty]

As my mac is my lifeline, I'm going to wait a while before upgrading to Lion - I'll let all you keen types iron out any bugs first My thinking was that I knew I could go from Tiger to SL, but whether I could get to Lion straight from Tiger was not clear.

Thanks to all the knowledgable types on this forum for the best source of mac info online xx

 

[Skizoboy]

I'd say go for an SSD if you don't mind the limited space of a 64Gb drive.
1Gb of RAM is not great but it's all right and the SSD speed will somewhat compensate for that.

This upgrade will make a drastic improvement in global performance and it's almost as easy to install as to install RAM (Only 4 more Torx screws).

The main drawback is you will have to reinstall the OS but Lion will be a great opportunity to make a clean install.

I recommend this particular model:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Crucial-CT0...JKWG/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1308691147&sr=8-2

You can always throw the extra money in some RAM after that. 2Gb will be more than enough for you usage and it's cheap…
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-VS2...6LBY/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1308691607&sr=8-3