Mid 2009 MBP 15" upgrade to SSD

[cnemitz22]

Hello all

I currently have a Mid 2009 MBP 15" A1286. Running 2.53ghz, 8gb ram and the original hard drive. I am running 10.6.8(Snow Leopard). I'm wanting to upgrade my hard drive to a solid state drive(256gb). For the quicker performance, cooler machine, etc etc. And I want to upgrade my OS to Yosemite. According to all the forums, my machine will be ok with the OS upgrade.

Reason for the OS upgrade, is, I am starting to notice a serious lag, with Safari and/or Firefox. Seems the newest release of Firefox, does not like my Snow Leopard very much. Pages seem to hang and I am constantly refreshing pages during the loading phase, to get them to even open. My sister has a MBP as well, a 2013 with Mavericks, and her internet streaming, off the same connection, is waaaaay better and she does not have the hang ups or lagging. Her system, is also running a smaller processor, though it is an i5.

I am hoping the upgrade of an SSD and operating system, will help and also help to avoid having to buy a new MBP, for a little while longer.

Any help or ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks!!

 

[snaky69]

Hello all

I currently have a Mid 2009 MBP 15" A1286. Running 2.53ghz, 8gb ram and the original hard drive. I am running 10.6.8(Snow Leopard). I'm wanting to upgrade my hard drive to a solid state drive(256gb). For the quicker performance, cooler machine, etc etc. And I want to upgrade my OS to Yosemite. According to all the forums, my machine will be ok with the OS upgrade.

Reason for the OS upgrade, is, I am starting to notice a serious lag, with Safari and/or Firefox. Seems the newest release of Firefox, does not like my Snow Leopard very much. Pages seem to hang and I am constantly refreshing pages during the loading phase, to get them to even open. My sister has a MBP as well, a 2013 with Mavericks, and her internet streaming, off the same connection, is waaaaay better and she does not have the hang ups or lagging. Her system, is also running a smaller processor, though it is an i5.

I am hoping the upgrade of an SSD and operating system, will help and also help to avoid having to buy a new MBP, for a little while longer.

Any help or ideas would be appreciated.

Thanks!!

Your symptoms could be linked to a ton of things. I'm on a pretty old (read 2008) PC at the moment and everything's just as fast as the day I got it.

I'm not sure what kind of help you're after though? A faster hard drive will do nothing for your browsing experience if that's what you're asking. Neither should an OS upgrade if the browser you use can still run on whatever it is you're on.

 

[brdeveloper]

Hello all

I currently have a Mid 2009 MBP 15" A1286. Running 2.53ghz, 8gb ram and the original hard drive. I am running 10.6.8(Snow Leopard). I'm wanting to upgrade my hard drive to a solid state drive(256gb). For the quicker performance, cooler machine, etc etc. And I want to upgrade my OS to Yosemite. According to all the forums, my machine will be ok with the OS upgrade.

Yes, my Late-2009 white Macbook is performing very well on Yosemite. It's a Core 2 Duo, 2.26GHz, 8GB RAM and a 250GB SSD.

Reason for the OS upgrade, is, I am starting to notice a serious lag, with Safari and/or Firefox. Seems the newest release of Firefox, does not like my Snow Leopard very much. Pages seem to hang and I am constantly refreshing pages during the loading phase, to get them to even open.

Snow Leopard's Safari is currently unusable. Gmail constantly hangs, a lot of pages don't even load properly. Firefox, on the other hand, was working well on 10.6.8 in the last year (until 2014 I still had my Mini on Snow Leopard). Perhaps you should try enabling the 64-bit kernel, since it wasn't default on Snow Leopard. There is a lot of tutorials around the web. It's only tricky if you want enabling it on white Macbooks.

My sister has a MBP as well, a 2013 with Mavericks, and her internet streaming, off the same connection, is waaaaay better and she does not have the hang ups or lagging. Her system, is also running a smaller processor, though it is an i5.

Clock speed (GHz, MHz) doesn't mean nothing these days. What matters are real-world benchmarks. A 2009 Core 2 Duo will, perhaps, compute a square root in dozens of clock cycles while a 2015 i5 can do the same task with only a fraction of these cycles. In the end, a lower clock speed can compute things faster. Of course, when we're comparing only 2015 Intel processors, a faster clock will usually compute things faster.

I am hoping the upgrade of an SSD and operating system, will help and also help to avoid having to buy a new MBP, for a little while longer.

Buying a SSD is the right thing to do. Your Macbook will look nearly as faster than your sister's when doing common tasks like browsing or working with non-graphics intensive applications.

 

[cnemitz22]

I backed up all of my information, files, etc. I then downloaded Yosemite onto my MBP, still running the HDD. It is running well, though I will be upgrading my hard drive to an SSD! Everything seems to be better than it was before!