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Upgrade early '08 mbp or sell and buy new MBP?

gaps

gaps

macrumors member
Original poster
Jul 19, 2009
68
0
Gilbert, AZ
Hello everyone, I have and 17" macbook pro (4,1) that i have been thinking about selling and buying the new 17"MBP on amazon. The reasons are: my battery is starting to swell and it only holds a charge for 1.5 hours, the superdrive is starting to fail, and the longer i wait to sell the less i will get for it. Soooooo, should I max out this computer by spending about $300-$500 for a new battery, superdrive, upgrade to 6gb ram, and maybe even buy a 120 or 160gb ssd and optibay and then wait to the next generation MBP that is rumored to be a complete redesign? Or should I sell now on ebay or craigslist for about $800-$1000 and buy a new one from amazon and enjoy? Thanks for any recommendations!
 
Your superdrive still works????
Haha I've only used mine a handfull of times since i bought my MBP only to find out the other day when I tried to back up some data on a dvd that my superdrive is dead to the world...short of blu ray do we really need these things(in a world/country with 50mbps broadband)?

To answer your question, I've been toying with the idea of getting a new MBP as mines getting on a bit, biggest question is is it really worth it...I mean you could just get a new battery and pop in another 2GB of ram and ur good to go.
Also depends on what you use it for?
 
I have an early '08 highend 15" mbp, and am still satisfied with it. I also have a Mac Pro for heavy duties though...

Depends on what you are using it for if an upgrade is worth it.

As for the superdrive, mine acted up some time ago and I just got a cleaning disk (about 5-10 bucks, don't remember exactly) put it in and since then it has been working flawlessly again. Might be worth a try?
 
Also must just add, I have the late 08 MBP with max specs, at the time.
In OSX I notice it has slowed quite a bit but when I boot into XP to do my .Net and Oracle DB dev work, which is massively CPU and mem intensive the machine is still blitz quick! Almost on par with the quad cores we have at the office :D wishful thinking.

Might be worth cleaning up OSX a bit, old apps/files/odds etc...
 
The difference between the early 08 and the mid 2010 MBPs was great (I have both), I think if you can afford it a new machine is in order.
 
I'm in the side boat as you. I have made the decision that at this time I'm going to keep on using the 2008 MBP. The response time for the programs that I use is tolerable and heck I don't want to work at blazing speeds at work. LOL

I am interested in some of the recommended programs to clean up the old mac os files. Any replies would be helpful to me.
 
thanks for all of the answers, I am going to stick with what I have until the next redesign and then go for a new one. Until then I will replace the battery and superdrive. I have been looking at the ones from amazon, OWC, and newegg. Anyone have any advice/experience on batteries or superdrives from those places?
 
Same here. New 3rd party battery for 40 Euros, SDrive failed long ago. Have it even ACare covered, but I can't afford having no mac for 2 days and honestly dont really care too much about the superdrive anyway..

although those quad 17 appearing in the refurbished apple store are really really looking nice – old 17 mbp 4.1 still works fine for me.
 
It looks like I can get the superdrive, battery, and 4gb stick of crucial ram from amazon for $261. The same things from owc is $309. Any reason to buy from OWC?
 
I just popped a hybrid SSD into my early 2008 Macbook. I've got 4 gig of RAM on the way from Crucial. Total out of pocket less than $200. I expect it will be a lot like having a new machine. The HDD controller hasn't "learned" my favorite files yet and with crashplan and Time Machine going crazy trying to back everything up, it's probably gonna be confused for several days to come. But once everything settles down, I expect to get SSD performance for things I use every day and I've gone from 5400 to 7200 rpm for everything else.

Of course one big upgrade is deleting firefox. What a pig. I was trying to show my wife a youtube video and the darn thing stuttered and stopped over and over. It didn't matter if I enabled html 5. It didn't matter if I closed all the MS software she had running. Finally I closed FF and viewed the video in safari with flash and it never stuttered again.

I don't know of any problems with my superdrive but I don't think I've burned anything for over a year now. If I had some tangible hardware problem, I'd go for the new MBP with the 6000+ geekbench score but since all is well with my Macbook I can live with a 3200 geekbench score for now. I would imagine the score will creep up a bit when the new RAM arrives and I pop it in to go from 2 gig to 4 gig. For me it's a want vs need thing. A modest sub $200 upgrade may keep me out of the Apple store for a whole nuther year.
 
I popped in my 4 Gig of RAM. I have had geekbench scores as low as 3000. I've had them as high as 3200. Just before popping in the RAM, I got 3300. After popping in the RAM I got 3150. Then the next few tries they were all above 3300 again. Clearly these scores jump around a bit, but my new "normal" is closer to 3300 than 3000. Also when I shut down to put in the RAM, I wasn't looking forward to rebooting. It's never been as slow as Windows but it's not instant on like my iPad. Well this time, with the hybrid SSD my Macbook was rebooted in what seems like half the time it normally takes.

A good thing just got better. I've dodged the upgrade bullet and for $200 I can walk by an Apple store without the iresistable urge to buy some sweet new MBP... For now... ;)
 
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