So since the end result wasn't as exciting as I was hoping, I thought I'd share some interesting discoveries along the way of getting the new machine up and ready to roll.
Hard Drive - I was pretty excited about the prospect of a SSD drive for the Operating system that was highly rumored. Unfortunately that is still rumored for another day. But in the process of googling around, I discovered the Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive. It's a 500GB 7200 RPM hard drive with a 4 GB SSD (Solid State Drive) that reportedly increases performance by 80% over standard drives. THE good news I bought it at Amazon for $99. Apple would have upgraded my 500GB 5400 RPM drive to an 256 GB SSD drive for $600 or $1200 for a 500 GB SSD! Allegedly the drive has to "learn" how you work and picks up a lot of speed as you "teach" it what apps you use. Here is a nice video that compares the Hybrid to other drives.
I'll give an update when my drive gets "smarter".
Memory - Apple wanted $200 to upgrade the 4 GB of ram on the off the shelf machine for a special order machine. I picked up 8GB of Corsair Ram on Amazon for about $70. Ram is cheap these days.
Dual Monitor Support If you haven't tried dual monitors, go for it. The extra real estate on your desktop is great and with the cost of monitors being so cheap it's a no brainer. If you nee to run Windows and Mac at the same time this is a great way to do it. A key to keeping the cost down is a little USB dual monitor adapter. In short you plug this USB thing in and connect a monitor to it. THe adapter runs about $65 at Amazon or other spots. I have a Kensington but there are lots of options. The interesting part was when I tried to load the Kensington software drivers, they told me that I needed an intel processor. Excuse me!! I have the newest hottest Intel processor the Sandy Bridge. Oh there I am on the dangerous bleeding edge again. Well, you gotta love Google, in about 2 minutes I found that all these things are made by a company called DisplayLink and they have newer drivers. I downloaded them and bingo, dual monitors with my new Mac.
Migration Assistant - Finally, I have to mention one of the greatest features of being a Mac owner. Migration Assistant. This little utility taeks all the pain out of upgrading to a new machein. YOu connect the old mac to the new one, either wirelessly or with a firewire 800 cable and go do soemthign else for about 20 hours. WHen you come back, your old mac has become your new mac. Everything comes over; all your settings applications, email, etc. PERFECT!. Try doing that with Windows!Summary - I'll give updates when there is something to report about the new MacBook Pro 2011, Right now I'd say if you have a Unibody MBP and you are looking for a big change you might want to wait for what many of us were hoping for, the MacBook Air like, slimmer, sleeker, SSD driven, MacBook Pro. Maybe next time which will probably be next year.
Since I wrote this article, I mada a major speed improvement. I replaced the Super drive with a 128GB SSD drive from OWC computing.
ReplyDeleteTHey have a neat kit called the disk doubler which supplies the bracket to replace the DVD. THey also had a external USB CD enclosure for the removed DVD. Works fine. I actually don't know if I ever used the DVD in this MBP.
At any I installed the new SSD, put on a clean copy of OSX 10.6 and then migrated my apps and my Parallels Virtual file to the SSD. My user file with all the pics movies, music etc. is fine on the Hybrid drive.
It screams! Using XBench to test the speed the Hybrid drive scored 37.32 on the Disk test. The SSD scored 309.22!!! Do it!!