Hey Mates! I have a Mac Book late 2008, the first one with the alu body. It's the best Notebook I've ever had. Now I'm thinking about to buy a new one because of the performance. I've already done some upgrades on the RAM and Harddisk, that's the reason why it worked so finde for this long period. I see just one more chance to get more performance out of the old machine and it is to replace the Harddisk with a Flashdisk. Can you recomand this or do you have any experiences about this? Is it a big step in performance? Thanks in advance!
Upgrading the Harddrive to an SSD is quite a big performance boost. A 256gb SSD can be bought for only $110 so I would totally recommend it
I have a 2008 alu macbook myself and added a 120gb SSD and a 750gb harddisk caddy. This baby is on fire now The silence and speed of the SSD is great to have. Since the price of SSDs are relatively low, I can only recommend it. Look for guides/tutorial on how to do it in these forums or in iFixit, it really is a piece of cake.
http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1786782 See this thread - just a couple of threads below yours in the forum actually! It contains various links to guides that should keep you right.
Recently upgraded the RAM in my Late 2009 unibody and upgraded the hard drive to a 256GB SSD. Performance has been amazing. Getting a new computer just isn't in the budget for right now and with these upgrades I don't feel like a need one anymore (for the time being). Hopefully it still acts as snappy on Yosemite.