Mid-2010 MBP cleaning and potential upgrade help/advice

Yes upgrading your Mac will make your computer run "faster" and "smoother". Go for whatever your computer will support in terms of Ram configuration.

And Apple use their own screw drivers. You'll have to find one that matches.

 

Battery:
I wouldn't buy the cheapest battery. Some are just plain junk.
If you can't get one from Apple (I don't think one can anymore), I'd try ifixit.com.

Hard drive:
THIS is what's "slowing you down".
REPLACE IT with an SSD.
DON'T spend a lot -- almost ANY SSD will do. I recommend either Crucial or a Sandisk Plus.
I wouldn't spend the extra $$ for a 1tb SSD. 240gb or 480gb should be fine.

Go to ifixit.com to see how to do the drive swap.
Buy THE RIGHT TOOLS for the job (Phillips #00 driver and TORX T-6 driver).
With the proper instructions and the right tools, swapping drives in a 2010 MBPro is a 15-minute job.

TIP:
Also buy a USB3 2.5" drive enclosure (will run about $15-20 or less).
Put the SSD into this FIRST, initialize it with Disk Utility to HFS+, journaling enabled.
Quickest and easiest way to "get it operational" is to download CarbonCopyCloner and "clone over" from the internal HDD to the SSD.
CCC is FREE to download, and it's FREE to use for the first 30 days.

DO A TEST BOOT:
a. Power down
b. Press the power on button
c. IMMEDIATELY hold down the option key until the startup manager appears
d. Select the external SSD and hit return.
Do you get a good boot?
Does everything look good?
If so, THEN "do the drive swap".

Take the old drive, put it into the external enclosure, and keep it for a backup drive.

RAM:
If you want more RAM, I'd suggest buying -ONE- 8gb DIMM, and just replace the top DIMM when you have the back opened up swapping drives.
BUT -- be aware that it's the old platter-based hard drive that is slowing things down the most.
IF you don't want to spend lots of money, replace the drive first, get it running, and THEN evaluate the overall performance of the Macbook.

 

For RAM, also check datamem.com:
https://www.datamemorysystems.com/apple-macbook-pro-memory-upgrades/

 

Plus use some install videos and use that to open your Mac Book Pro!

 

I want to do the same thing to my Mid 2010 13" MacBook Pro that is running macOS Sierra. I'm thinking about the Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSD (wanted 1TB but that's too expensive), also want 16GB of RAM just not sure which one yet. Need to replace the battery as well, it's health is 50% at 1084 cycles, not sure what to replace it with.

I've looked at the new Macs and while I'd like to buy a new computer, just can't spend that kind of money right now. Plus, I don't like that Apple has made it so we can't upgrade the RAM and removed the disc drive. I use my drive all the time for Redbox movies. I'd hate to have to lug along a separate drive just for that. So yeah, I'm sticking with my MacBook Pro....for now. Just want it to be a bit faster and have more storage capabilty.

 

You could have a number of bottlenecks. Running out of RAM, cpu, slow hard disk, hard disk too full, etc.

When the system is running slowly open up Activity Monitor and click on the "Memory" tab at the top. You'll see something like this at the bottom:



So is all of your memory used? How much swap is Used? If you are using a lot of Swap space on your hard disk that is going to slow things down.

With your hard disk, how big is the disk and how much space is free? I get a major performance hit <10%, so the larger amount free the better. Data on the outer edges on the disk will be retrieved faster than data on the inner tracks. There is conflicting information about whether rebuilding disk directories with something like Diskwarrior will help with disk efficiency. I do rebuild sometimes but have never benchmarked the result. Maybe someone else has.

Check out disk activity with the Disk tab:



If you are reading/writing data faster than your disk can handle it that can be the problem.

To check whether cpu is a problem check the CPU tab:



If the % CPU is more than the number of processors (I.E., 4 processors x 100% = 400%) then your cpu could be the bottleneck. If you see some process that is consuming all of your cpu then you might have a runaway process causing the problem. [I have 24 virtual CPUS so I know I'm in trouble if the total of the % CPU column > 2400%]. If you are just running Safari and mail you're probably OK. But if you're rendering that you may have it maxed out.

Before making an investment in upgrading hardware try to determine which component is the bottleneck. If it's your CPU then adding RAM or an SSD likely won't make much difference.