Upgrades to an early 2008 MacBook

[Essence_of_War]

A friend of mine was asking about upgrades they could make to their early 2008 MacBook (non-pro!) to get another couple of years of life out of it.

It's stock as far as I know:
1GB (2x 512 MB) Ram 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM PC2-5300
120GB Serial ATA; 5400 rpm
2.1GHz Core2Duo

1) I suggested swapping the HDD for an SSD. I think any 2.5' SSD will work, right?

2) I also suggested getting the ram up to 4 GB @ 2x2GB.

I've never played with laptops of any sort before, but I've watched a friend open up a mac mini, I've built my own desktop twice (with a few years between) and I've done some basic upgrade/maintenance on my GFs macpro (added RAM and HDDs, cleaned/re-seated GPU). Would I be able to do these upgrades without too much trouble?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

4gb ram + SSD = Happy MacBook. Othe 2008 MacBooks (pre-unibody) those upgrades are easy. There are videos on YouTube and macsales.com. Basically you take out the battery, remove a couple screws on a cover inside the battery bay, and slide the ram in on one side, and the he'd on the other side.

I have almost the same machine with the ram upgrade and an SSD and its very usable. (2009 MacBook non-unibody... So maybe the GPU is different and its 2.13 ghz.)

 

[Essence_of_War]

Nice! That doesn't sound too hard to do, and it's good to hear that you find it so usable still. My friend's trying to get another 2ish years of use out of this one, so it sounds like this is the right path to go down.

All 2.5' SSDs should be compatible with the MacBook, right?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

All 2.5' SSDs should be compatible with the MacBook, right?

Pretty much.

If your MacBook has an nvidia chipset, a lot of sandfoce ssds will throttle down to sata1 speeds. From what I read, everybody's blaming everybody else. (Apple, nvidia and sandfoce.) then 2010 apple switched to intel chipsets and everybody forgot about it.

Depending on the firmware revision, you may not see it. Apple released firmware fixes for some of the effected MacBook pros, and some SSD I sellers released fixes for some o their drives. I happen to not have gotten a fix.

Otherwise, any data drive should work.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Whoa, I had no idea about that.

I was going to recommend the Samsung 840/840 Pro series, so hopefully that shouldn't be an issue.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Yeah, theyre good.

but i wouldnt turn down a good deal on a sandforce either - at the very least you're still getting a crazy-snappy responding system, even if it maxes out at "only" 4x as fast as the original hdd in sequential operations.

 

[Essence_of_War]

That's a fair point. The seek times are still super low, and she hasn't had an SSD in a laptop or desktop before, so she won't really have a reference to compare it with other than it running circles around her old HDD.

 

[Eug]

Just get the lowest power SSD (esp. for idle power) you can find. Any SSD willl be a huge, huge improvement in performance.

<-- Happy camper: 2009 MacBook Pro with 4 GB RAM and SSD.