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MacBook Pro Upgrade

S

SJSwains

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Aug 10, 2012
11
0
London
I'm in the UK and looking to upgrade my MacBookPro. I have a:

15" early 2011
2GHz intel Core i7
4GB 1333 MHz DDR3
AMD Radeon HD 6490M 256 MB
OS x 10.9.2

I freelance as a videographer and editor using PPro CS6 and my laptop is in desperate need of an upgrade. Does anyone have any advice on what's a suitable upgrade solution? Are SSDs the way forward rather than just upgrading RAM? I'm not the most computer literate, so any advice that can be offered will be enormously appreciated.

Thank you.
 
An upgrade to 8 or 16 GB of 204-pin DDR3 SO-DIMM RAM will probably do wonders, as will an upgrade to a 256 GB SSD.

MacBook, MacBook Pro: Replacing the Hard Disk Drive, transferring data to the new HDD

the guide includes:
  • 0. Identify your MacBook or MacBook Pro
  • 1. Getting a new HDD
  • 2. Guides to replace the internal HDD with a newer one
  • 3. Transferring data from the old HDD to the new HDD
  • 4. Using the optical disk drive (ODD) slot for placing an SSD or HDD inside the MB/P (OPTIBAY)
​


 
SJSwains said:
I'm in the UK and looking to upgrade my MacBookPro. I have a:

15" early 2011
2GHz intel Core i7
4GB 1333 MHz DDR3
AMD Radeon HD 6490M 256 MB
OS x 10.9.2

I freelance as a videographer and editor using PPro CS6 and my laptop is in desperate need of an upgrade. Does anyone have any advice on what's a suitable upgrade solution? Are SSDs the way forward rather than just upgrading RAM? I'm not the most computer literate, so any advice that can be offered will be enormously appreciated.

Thank you.
Click to expand...

Consider reapplying the thermal paste and doing a reball on your GPU. Your model is one of those affected by Radeongate.

An SSD is probably the best upgrade you can give your MBP. With an SSD, your Mac will just boot in 11 seconds, plus instant app launching. Say goodbye to lags :)

However, upgrading to an SSD prior to installing the proper amount of RAM would reduce the life of the SSD, and still be quite slow. First, with inadequate RAM, the SSD will be utilized as virtual memory, offsetting the lack of physical RAM. By doing this, the computer will write tasks that are normally written to RAM, to the SSD.

Because SSDs have only a finite amount of writes available to each transistor, you'll effectively shorten its lifetime, and increase the risk of data loss. Additionally, even fast SSDs pale in comparison to the speed of RAM – ~500MB/s in SATA3 SSDs (700MB/s in PCIe ones) vs. ~23 GB/s in RAM (@1333 MHz). Therefore, the best solution would be to install the appropriate amount of RAM first, followed by an SSD upgrade. Once the proper amount of RAM is installed, an SSD will truly shine.
 
Thanks so much for the advice. I'll upgrade my RAM and then look at an SSD. Very helpful, thank you.

Consider reapplying the thermal paste and doing a reball on your GPU. Your model is one of those affected by Radeongate.
Click to expand...

Could you elaborate a little for me please? Sorry, but I don't understand :confused:

Also I have an additional problem. I've been trying to clear some space on my Hard Drive. I have approx 116GB of "Other" and 127GB of "Backup" that I can't find. (see attached)

Premiere Pro stores cache files for playback and you can clear these in the program, which I have done. I've then swept with OmniDisk Sweeper and come up with the following. (see attached)

The Drive List says I have only 80.6GB free, whereas the sweep reveals that I have 212GB of data on my HD therefore over 280GB free. I can't get to these phantom files. Do they actually exist and does anyone know why they keep showing up?

Thanks again.
 

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"Phantom" files can be many things...
most of the time they are just system files, perhaps local copies of time machine backups.
How to disable mobile backup (time machine)
http://wiki.summercode.com/how_to_disable_mobile_backups_on_lion

Can you expand your folder hierarchy and narrow down folders that are using up the space? I would start with Users folder and see what files are taking up space in there.

I am using Clean My Mac 2 to keep my mac clean. It can be good thing to invest in, when/if you are not comfortable deleting files and folders your know nothing of, or working in terminal. :)
 
SJSwains said:
Could you elaborate a little for me please? Sorry, but I don't understand :confused:
Click to expand...

Radeongate is the GPU failure that has hit thousands of 2011 15"/17" MBPs worldwide. Mine was affected by it too (it cost me a good USD300 logic board repair).

The culprit for Radeongate was a manufacturing defect (over-application of thermal paste and using unleaded solder for "environmental reasons", at the expense of consumers).
 
Thanks again for the help guys.

I found this post in the Apple Support Community, which helped enormously with the phantom storage.

Check it out

It worked a treat and has halved my storage space. Repair Disk got rid of 60GB of "other" storage. Turning off Time Machine, restarting and repairing disk one more time got rid of all the "backup" files now giving me 250GB free storage. I feel lighter.

Not sure I'm going to leave Time Machine off though as I feel a bit vulnerable. Good to know however.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Thanks once again.
 
Keep in kind that installing an SSD will make your computer seem faster, but your return on investment will be horrible. Buying an aftermarket SSD is like throwing money out the window. You will never recoup that money.

If you plan to actually sell your computer and buy a new one within the next year or two, I would just skip the added expense of upgrades and buy a new computer now.
 
SJSwains said:
Thanks again for the help guys.

I found this post in the Apple Support Community, which helped enormously with the phantom storage.

Check it out

It worked a treat and has halved my storage space. Repair Disk got rid of 60GB of "other" storage. Turning off Time Machine, restarting and repairing disk one more time got rid of all the "backup" files now giving me 250GB free storage. I feel lighter.

Not sure I'm going to leave Time Machine off though as I feel a bit vulnerable. Good to know however.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Thanks once again.
Click to expand...

You can turn off local time machine backups but continue to back up to an external drive. See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3825195 for information.
 
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