upgrading HD and RAM on MBP

[Tom Foolery]

I have a 15" C2D MBP with a 160GB HD and 2GB Ram, i think i want to upgrade it sometime soon. western digital makes a low priced 250GB HD which appears to be MBP compatible.

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Western Digital/WD2500BEVS/

i wanted to know if this would be a good investment or if it would crap out on me in a month.

As for ram to upgrade to 4GB from apple costs like 1000 but other places sell it much cheaper than that

http://cgi.ebay.ca/2GB-Single-Stick...287625QQihZ013QQcategoryZ152542QQcmdZViewItem

somthing must not be right if apple can get away with selling these for ten times their worth. basically my question is can i get quality ram for cheap and it the real deal apple Ram worth the 1000

finally i don't have an apple care plan yet but i'm going to get one, if i upgrade my mbp before i buy apple care will my warrenty be void

 

[MM07]

I have read that a HD and RAM upgrade will not void your Apple Care.

You might as well get 4G of RAM from Macsales as well. I just got my 4G for $100.

 

[Kendall015]

Just FYI, Ram upgrades take about 10 minutes and are really easy... Hard drive upgrades require taking apart the whole MBP to get at the hard drive. It is pretty time consuming though I haven't done it myself.

 

[a4abt]

I did both the RAM and the HDD upgrades on my MBP.

I got the RAM from Kingston (2x2gb for ~$95). This upgrade took me less than 5 minutes.

The hard drive upgrade is more complex. It took me ~40 minutes to do it. You have to be VERY careful and take your time. There are a lot of screws to remove. It is very do-able, but you must be very gentle! I got my Western Digital hard drive from WD's website (320gb for $200).

I would suggest both upgrades, depending on your budget

 

[Tom Foolery]

thanks this has really convinced me but i still have a few unaswer questions

first what's the deal with apple's rediculously overpriced ram

and second with the 4 gigs of ram do you notice a big increase in preformance. i don't run very resource consuming programs execpt for Azureus, and parallels, so is it even worth it

 

[MacBookJoePro]

thanks this has really convinced me but i still have a few unaswer questions

first what's the deal with apple's rediculously overpriced ram

and second with the 4 gigs of ram do you notice a big increase in preformance. i don't run very resource consuming programs execpt for Azureus, and parallels, so is it even worth it

Probably with Azureus and Parallels your really going to need the RAM. With "whatever your doing with Azureus" i know that it keeps the "files" in memory while "bittorrenting" (hehe). Parallels alone running windows xp doesn't take up much memory but If your running an intensive app in windows xp or just running (super weak) vista then the more memory the better. I have 2 GB in my MBP and when I run Matlab under XP in Parallels, i have no memory available thus, I'm upgrading to 4GB in a couple of days.

-JoE