I have the latest generation of Macbook Pro, which came as stock with the Intel Core Duo 2 2.5ghz processor, 250gb 5400RPM HDD and 2gb RAM. As standard it was flat-out awesome, incorporating the new touchpad that is seen on the Macbook Air and some of the features you get from the iPhone and iPod Touch. OSX Leopard was pre-installed and is fantastic and a perfect example of what milestone releases should be like: Tiger was great - Leopard has taken that and actually enhanced it, whilst maintaining all the stability and core features you were used to. Unlike certain other upgrades, which took a reasonably stable operating system (XP) and created a whole shitstorm of a mess with its “upgrade” (Vista.)
But if you’re anything like me, then “stock” really isn’t good enough and I was intrigued to know what tweaks and upgrades I could make to really make this beast fly. So here are a few pointers:
1) Disable Spotlight: I’ve never got in to Spotlight as a search tool, so if you also don’t use it, then disable it as it uses processor power to maintain its indices. Here’s how to do it (don’t follow the tutorial, use the advice in the third comment.)
2) Disable Dashboard: Everything nowadays is widgets and plugins. If you’re not using it then you can disable it. Here’s how. I disabled it, found I missed it, so re-enabled it. But there are rumours of dashboard widgets being bad at memory management, so keep an eye on your activity monitor to see if anything’s not playing nicely.
3) Upgrade your RAM: this is a simple 2 minute fix which will set you back about £50 for 4GB. (Reason 1 to not buy-to-order (BTO): RAM upgrade from Apple is £200 ($400) at BTO / £300 ($600) from Apple store, whereas 4GB of Crucial or Kingston is just as good (if not better, Apple use Hynix), four times cheaper and you keep the RAM that comes out of your MBP to use elsewhere.) It’s a simple job to install and doesn’t invalidate your warranty.
4) Change your hard drive: OSX is one of the few operating systems that will actually make use of a fatload of RAM. But RAM can only do so much and if you do any seriously intensive activities, particularly those that are constantly writing to disc, such as video encoding, then the speed of your hard drive really comes in to play. The stock drive is 5400RPM and the BTO upgrade to a 7200RPM costs (a quite reasonable) $200. But upgrading your drive is not such a difficult job to achieve, even though it is a lot more involved than the older Macbooks. The main problem, however, is that it will invalidate your warranty if you do it - and should something go wrong with your MBP which needs it to be sent off for repair, then the advice is to put your stock HDD back in which is a bit of a ball-ache. That said, it is certainly possible and since doing it, there’s been a noticeable increase in system performance. There are two viable options for the new drive: the Seagate Momentus 7200.2 or the Hitachi Travelstar 7k200. I went for the latter for a mere $190, which, judging by some reviews, slightly outperforms the Seagate. It also has a comparable heat signature to the old drive*, and the clincher, the upgrade kit comes with a free USB caddy. (Reason 2 not to BTO: although the cost of the drive is comparable to that if you do it at order time, if you do it yourself then you obviously get to keep the drive that comes out, which makes for a perfect Time Machine (backup) drive.). I actually had a local Apple authorised center install the drive for me, solving the warranty-invalidating problem, which cost $65. A bit of a rip-off, but worth it, I think.
I saved some cash by preparing the drive myself, which is very easy:
Step 1: Put new hard drive in USB caddy and mount on your system. Use disk utility to format the drive to Mac OSX (Journaled). Create any other partitions you want (I took the opportunity to move all my music and video files to a separate partition.) Formatting the drive ought to do this, but I then zeroed-out the boot partition, just to be sure. It’s quite a slow operation, so be patient.
Step 2: Use SuperDuper!, a fantastic piece of shareware (although a measly $27 if you want to buy it), to create a bootable clone of your existing system on the new drive. Again, it’s a little slow, so be patient.
Step 3: Swap the drives over.
Step 4: Boot (and hope for the best.) In my case, everything went perfectly, and with the bootable clone now in force, my system was exactly the same as before - just running neatly off the new drive (no re-installs, system disks or anything else required.) Perfect.
Optional Step 5: Zero out your old drive in the USB caddy and use it as your Time Machine backup drive and perform a full backup.
And that’s it. Although the hardware upgrade stuff took more time than had I just opted for a BTO, I’ve saved at least $350 and have the old hardware (RAM for my Mac Mini and drive for Time Machine.) It feels like a cop-out to not replace the HDD myself (I certainly feel capable of doing it) but I think the $65 to keep my $300 AppleCare warranty intact was well worth it.
There are many more tweaks that I will be looking at in the coming weeks, but so far, I’m chuffed to bits with a stable, reliable and super-quick laptop that is a real delight to work on.
* You may consider the iStatPro dashboard widget to monitor the heat and the excellent Fan Control system extension to tweak your fans.
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