Replacing MBP 15 Hard-rive and Ram

[patrikc8]

So my friend says her Macbook Pro 15inch 2009 is acting slow and she constantly complains about not having enough space!

My plan was to upgrade the old 320GB 5400RPM to the new Seagate 750GB Momentus XT . Problem is i am a bit confused and need some advice

To upgrade to the New harddrive i have all the necessary srews according to iFixit but i am still puzzled on how to restore the hardrive to exactly the same as it was before.

I use time machine and i know i could back up the Mac with that but after i install the hardrive im guessing i would have to install OSX Snow Leopard or OSX Lion? . If so i think ill have to search for the CD as i believe OSX Lion is digital or by thumbdrive.


Also she currently has 4GB DDR3 Ram but i was wondering if upgrading that to 8GB would be of any use? she does do some film editing but not that much.


Thanks

 

[GGJstudios]

To upgrade to the New harddrive i have all the necessary srews according to iFixit but i am still puzzled on how to restore the hardrive to exactly the same as it was before.

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your existing drive to the new drive, then swap the drives and boot up.

Also she currently has 4GB DDR3 Ram but i was wondering if upgrading that to 8GB would be of any use? she does do some film editing but not that much.

Many say RAM is cheap, so get as much as you can, even if it's not needed. However, RAM prices continue to fall, and if more isn't needed now, waiting to buy at a later time when it's actually needed will probably result in a lower price.

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

 

[patrikc8]

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your existing drive to the new drive, then swap the drives and boot up.

Many say RAM is cheap, so get as much as you can, even if it's not needed. However, RAM prices continue to fall, and if more isn't needed now, waiting to buy at a later time when it's actually needed will probably result in a lower price.

To determine if you can benefit from more RAM, launch Activity Monitor and click the System Memory tab at the bottom to check your page outs. Page outs are cumulative since your last restart, so the best way to check is to restart your computer and track page outs under your normal workload (the apps, browser pages and documents you normally would have open). If your page outs are significant (say 1GB or more) under normal use, you may benefit from more RAM.

Mac OS X: Reading system memory usage in Activity Monitor

Thanks! , for Copy Cloner, would i have to plug in the new hardrive into the mac somehow? just confused on how to use it

 

[GGJstudios]

Thanks! , for Copy Cloner, would i have to plug in the new hardrive into the mac somehow? just confused on how to use it

Buy a drive in an external enclosure, or buy an external enclosure for the drive you select. Plug it in via USB or Firewire and use CCC to clone your external drive to the external. Then take both drives out and swap them. The new drive is now your internal drive and your old internal drive is now in an external enclosure, available to be used for backups or extra storage.

 

[tresean1]

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your existing drive to the new drive, then swap the drives and boot up.

I am actually considering doing that. I am sure this question has already been asked, but when you "clone" you existing drive (if I have a Bootcamp partition, or multiple partitions, etc) will it clone the ENTIRE drive (all partitions) as-is...or will it just clone the Mac OS portion of it and leave my Windows installation/files behind?

 

[GGJstudios]

I am actually considering doing that. I am sure this question has already been asked, but when you "clone" you existing drive (if I have a Bootcamp partition, or multiple partitions, etc) will it clone the ENTIRE drive (all partitions) as-is...or will it just clone the Mac OS portion of it and leave my Windows installation/files behind?

Can CCC back up my BootCamp (Windows) partition?