MacBook makeovers bring new life to a couple of old laptops

Last weekend provided not one, but two opportunities for me to do some upgrades to some “old” MacBooks to bring ’em up to workable condition. To start with, one client of mine wanted to get rid of an unused MacBook, so I decided to purchase it from her as a machine for training. The other client had one of the original 15″ Intel Core Duo MacBook Pros and doesn’t want to spend the money on a new machine. In both cases, the machines were running older versions of Mac OS X, had insufficient RAM, and had hard drives that were both slow and small. The following post is a textbook example of how you can bring new life to slightly old Macs by just spending enough money to upgrade the memory, OS, and hard disk drive.

For the MacBook, I decided that I wanted to max out its RAM, add more hard drive space, and speed up the hard drive while I was at it. I wanted to set up the machine with Mac OS X 10.6 and a Boot Camp partition running Windows 7, with an alternative external boot drive containing Mac OS X Server 10.6. The machine’s initial setup: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a 160GB 5400 RPM SATA hard disk. I chose to max out the RAM to a total of 6GB, purchase a 500GB 7200 RPM drive for the internal drive, and procure a USB 2.0 bus-powered external shell for the existing drive. This MacBook was also running Mac OS X 10.5.8, and I wanted to update it to the latest version of Snow Leopard. Click “Read More” to find out how the upgrades went.

TUAWMacBook makeovers bring new life to a couple of old laptops originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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