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How Can I Upgrade My MacBook?

G

G4me^0Ver

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 13, 2010
6
0
Devon, United Kingdom
I'm thinking about giving my late 2008 aluminium unibody MacBook an upgrade, as I would like to expand it's gaming capabilities (I use windows 7 on Bootcamp). The problem I have is what to upgrade first as my limited budget means I cannot buy everything at once. I've been looking at RAM upgrades but I don't know if I should get some better graphics first or what. I haven't really got a clue as to what effect each upgrade will have on performance or, indeed, what can be upgraded on my MacBook. Any help would be greatly, greatly appreciated.... Thanks in advance!
 
You cannot upgrade the graphics on a MBP. They are part of the logic board.

You can only upgrade RAM and the HDD. How much RAM do you have at the moment? An SSD would give you the most notable difference.
 
Which version of W7? 32 bit/64 bit? What do you do with W7 that performance is poor?

EDIT: How limited is your budget?

B
 
@stridemat - I've got 2x 1gb at the moment and I've been looking at these to upgrade to http://www.crucial.com/uk/store/mpartspecs.aspx?mtbpoid=2E9B2B4EA5CA7304 but are you saying I should upgrade my hard drive instead???

@balamw - I believe it's 64bit and I'm not really having any performance problems but I'd just like to up the graphics on my games a bit. At the moment they get slow and jumpy if I try putting them higher.

Budget = less than £100 first time round....
 
Last edited by a moderator:
G4me^0Ver said:
Budget = less than £100 first time round....
Click to expand...

Buying a decent SSD within that budget will not give you much storage. I would verge on purchasing the RAM. It won't make a large difference to your graphics performance, but it's not going to make your Mac slower.

I always use Crucial for my RAM, so that shouldn't cause you any problems.
 
G4me^0Ver said:
Can you just tell me a bit more about how ssds are different to hdds and why an ssd would help me?? Sorry but I don't know much about them....:eek:
Click to expand...

SSDs use similar memory what you can find in iPhones for example, flash memory. While HDs have to spin up in order to seek for something, SSDs have no moving parts so the latency is much lower. Most SSDs also have higher read and write speeds than any HDs on the market. HD is the slowest component in today's computers. SSD will speed up things like booting and launching apps. Mainly stuff that require disk access.

SSDs are nice but still quite expensive. For 100£, you would get something like 60GB. Personally I would just get the RAM and maybe buy SSD later on when the prices are cheaper.
 
G4me^0Ver said:
Thanks very much I'll think on it but I think I'll probably end up getting the RAM first and maybe make a future investment on a ssd.
Click to expand...

Whenever you go for it, my advice is ditch the optical drive, and fit an ssd instead. For 130-200 € you get an amazing upgrade!

I did it myself and I am so glad I went this way instead of the RAM upgrade. Not only I get blazing App and startup speed, but I also got 120 gigs more of storage. Well worth it!


Note: In order to replace opt-->ssd you will need something like OptiBay. This is a great place to get you started (or anyone): MCE OptiBay alternative
 
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