Late 2007 MacBook upgrade options

[Benson86]

Hi all, im considering buying my moms old 2.2ghz white macbook so se can get the new air. Its got the original 5400rpm hd, and I upgraded it to 2gb of ram for her a year or so ago. My question is, if I get it, what would be the better upgrade: An SSD drive for ~$120, or 4gb of ram + a 7200rpm drive for ~$100?

Im thinking probably the SSD but want to hear from others. Also, will the SSD give better battery life? Will the 7200rpm hurt battery life? And how would a macbook perform with the ssd, does it have that "instant on" feeling that the new airs supposedly have?

Thanks!

 

[GfulDedFan]

I think the 4GB + 7200rpm is the better deal especially at that price. It looks more like $150 when I price it (4GB kit and a 320GB WD Black).

 

[ddehr026]

4gb ram here - $54.99

320gb scorpio black here - $49.99

Not quite sure where he got $150 from.... These two come out to $105 no tax, free shipping


I don't think the 7200rpm hurts battery life, at least noticeably. SSD would be nice but I think you would be better with the hdd and ram personally. Your call

 

[mcdonap]

I have a mid 2007 Macbook. In November 2010 I upgraded to 4 GB RAM and a 240 GB SSD. My MacBook can only address 3 GB Ram, but I did a lot of research and decided to go with 4 anyway. (Even though only 3 could be addressed, some tests showed matched pairs of 2 performed better than just 3. Granted, this is data provided by a company that sells RAM, but here are some of the tests I looked at:
http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/MacBook/Testing/Memory_Benchmarks )

As mentioned, I also put in a 240GB SSD. That is where I really saw the improvement! The machine boots up incredibly fast. I do have a MBA 11, and while the Macbook doesn't boot up quite as fast it's still very fast. Everything loads so quickly. It's pretty amazing! I haven't noticed a vast improvement in battery life - maybe a little better.

I might suggest running the MacBook for a while with all the programs you want on it. See what your RAM usage is in activity monitor - maybe you don't need the extra RAM. If you do, that may be the best place to start.

In my own experience, the SSD was the thing that really made the difference.

Good luck!

 

[mechanopony]

In my own experience, the SSD was the thing that really made the difference.

Very true. At some point, because of the OS's cap for recognizing the amount of ram you have, SSD is the way to go. I have 3GB of RAM in my old 2007 C2D, and that only ran things for so long. Once I swapped out the HDD for an SSD (this is my beater laptop), everything ran so much faster and more efficient.

I multitask Adobe graphic programs, so yeah, RAM only gets so far...