Upgrade or fix?

[rubyx]

I have a 13" aluminium unibody macbook purchased in October 2008 (the lower spec'd model). It has always been my main computer and it was carried around a lot to and from classes. I mostly just use Chrome/Adium/Mail but I am into webdesign so I'm also using Photoshop quite a bit. I used to play games like The Sims 3 but even though I have no expansion packs or additional content, that now lags far too much to be playable.

In a nutshell, these are my issues. I had never had any problems at all until a few months back:
- battery (down to 61% capacity)
- bluetooth. I've had it become "unavailable" several times and only reappear after multiple restarts. I use a bluetooth mouse and keyboard at home so this is rather annoying.
- general slowness. I see the dreaded beachball way too often and right now my page outs are about 10% of my total page ins.
- superdrive no longer reads discs

Now I know I can replace the battery and such myself but I'm wondering - is it worth it? I am not tech savvy at all but it seems like I'll be pouring a lot of money into an "old" machine.

I am thinking of just replacing it with a 13" MBP. Again it would be the lowest spec'd model because I don't really care about extra disk space & I don't think the different processor really justifies the large price gap for me personally.

Any help or input would be appreciated

 

[session101]

i think buying the 13" MBP would definately be an upgrade, i want to do the same... as far as your macbook, when was the last time it was properly formatted and OSX put on there? what OSX is on there now? you can hope that your cd-rom drive is just super dirty and try to clean it up to get it to work, also if you want to speed it up, RAM is super cheap, you could do a little bit of leg work and have it back up again, probably make more $$$ selling it after you fix it. you can also open up the top case and clean out all the dust and everything. and your battery? maybe it needs to be calibrated? how many cycles are on it?

 

[rubyx]

Thanks for replying

Probably formatted about a year ago? I was going to do it again but the DVD drive died before I got a change to try that. I was running SL and I tried upgrading to Lion not realising I couldn't do a clean install (at least not easily). Lion doesn't seem to be running any slower than SL did though, strangely enough.

For the drive I have tried to clean it but it made no difference. The SuperDrive Updater function gave me an error message when I tried it under SL which sort of made me think it was indeed dead. Under Lion it's telling me I'm up to date though.

The battery is up to 308 cycles now. I've noticed Cocoa telling me I'm not quite at full charge (96%) when my macbook itself says I am, though I doubt that really matters.

I had no idea you could actually open it all up to clean it, I'm a bit worried I'd do more harm than good though!

 

[session101]

ok so lets assume your cd-drive is dead... i would buy one for cheap on eBay, and when you open your macbook up to replace it, take the time to clean out all the dust and everything, dump $30-40 on some RAM and replace that also, I would re-format but before you do make a bootable usb drive to boot and install from

see if you like the macbook afterwards..if you don't then sell it, at least you'll get most of your money back now that it is complete without any problems and someone will be happy to buy it