what upgrades for a MBP?

[josta]

Hi everyone,
I'll be ordering my highly anticipated C2D MBP on Monday! I'm planning on a 15 inch, matte screen, 2.16. I can upgrade either the ram or the harddrive, but probably not both. My plan is to upgrade to the 160gb harddrive then in a couple of months buy another 1GB stick and instal it myself. Theoretically the price will come down a little on the ram, and since it is something I can do myself (as opposed to doing a harddrive swap) I think that spending the extra money on the harddrive now is the best way to go. Does this sound like a good way to go about things?
Thanks everyone for your advice!

 

[m2gc]

prolly the best route imo

 

[Temujin]

Yes.

Changing the harddrive is supposed to be a bit tricky, so I would go for the bigger drive opposed to more ram.

Changing and buying ram your self is easy and will save you money.

 

[IlluminatedSage]

i believe that adding ram later is not bad at all.

the only real difference would be that your graphics chip in the end will have 1/2 the ram. ie 128 instead of 256vram.

so ... while you will save some money, it depends on what you will use it for.

you may be better off getting the midrange unit with the 2 gigs of ram, 160 gb hd, and the gpu with more vram.

just a thought. remember if you are a student, you can get it with a discount, also on applecare. fyi, if you have a kid. buy it for them, hell even if they are like 8.

 

[WildCowboy]

just a thought. remember if you are a student, you can get it with a discount, also on applecare. fyi, if you have a kid. buy it for them, hell even if they are like 8.

If your 8-year-old happens to be in college...

 

[steelfist]

best to upgrade the non-upgradeable parts first, get a faster cpu, better graphics card, and then upgrade the hard drive and ram if you can still afford it. it's more worth it that way. you can always upgrade those last two later.

 

[josta]

I'm in my 4th year of grad school and will be using it mostely for photoshop, illustrator, and data analysis. I don't believe (correct me if I'm wrong) that I'll need a top of the line graphics card. I'm a developmental biologist/geneticist so the graphics I do are fairly simple, mostly analysis of photos on photoshop. I do a lot with excel sheets to track data as well as some simple bioinformatics and constructing phylogenetic trees etc. The next one up (2.33) is outside of my pricerange since I still have to buy a sleeve etc to protect it.I know the chances of me feeling like upgrading a harddrive later are slim, so I thought I would do that now while I'm already spending a big chunck of change and doing ram further down the road. And don't worry, I'm all over the student discount!

 

[jeremyschultz]

One thing about the MBP is that it has two RAM slots and, whether you get 2GB or 3GB now, both will be filled. If you upgrade RAM in the future, you will have an extra 1GB of memory lying around.

 

[josta]

One thing about the MBP is that it has two RAM slots and, whether you get 2GB or 3GB now, both will be filled. If you upgrade RAM in the future, you will have an extra 1GB of memory lying around.

That's a good point I hadn't really thought about. Right now adding 2 GB is not financially possible. But if I wait a couple of months the price might have come down enough for me to do it, and not have an extra 1GB stick on my hands.

 

[jeremyschultz]

I bought my MBP from MacConnection.com a few days ago, and they can insert the extra 1GB for $400 (instead of Apple's $575). If you do wait, I think by the time that 1GB is cheaper the newer MBP may be "around the corner."

 

[josta]

I bought my MBP from MacConnection.com a few days ago, and they can insert the extra 1GB for $400 (instead of Apple's $575). If you do wait, I think by the time that 1GB is cheaper the newer MBP may be "around the corner."

sorry i wasn't clear...i didn't mean waiting till they are cheaper to by the mpb, just waiting till the price on the ram has dropped a bit to buy a 1gb or 2gb stick of ram...i can hardly wait till Monday (although my credit card says i have to wait till monday) to complete my order.
thanks all for your advice!