Anyone else running Mac

crankbndr Mon Sep 15, 2014 12:19 am

My Macbook Pro is already five years old and getting a little long in the tooth, it came with OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard and after three OS upgrades in now runs OSX 10.9 Mavericks.
Each OS upgrade seemed to be a little more resource hungry, after OSX 10.9 I started seeing the spinning beach ball when I opened any application (Apples version of MS hour glass).
I started thinking thinking of ways to speed things up like more RAM and SSD hard drive, I have a Intel 2.8 GHz 2 core CPU, 4 GB RAM and 500 GB HDD that only has 30 GB used.
The first thing I did was install a drive cleaner from App Store, I used AVGs free cleaner but there are others. I ran it and it found 1GB of junk files on my drive, after cleaning my Macbook
was much faster. Looking for more speed I got 8 GBs RAM from Crucial and a new SSD drive from OWC.

The SSD came with an enclosure for my old HDD to make it a external drive. I removed the bottom cover and had the RAM and SSD installed in about 15 min.

I made a bootable thumb drive with a fresh copy of OSX 10.9 Mavericks and after formatting the SSD installed the OS from the thumb drive.
The computer is lightning fast now, like a Corvette that I drive in the slow lane. I can boot from my old HDD that went in the external enclosure also, its
like having two computers. Now ready for OSX 10.10 coming soon! The cost of the upgrade was about 200$, a few years ago it would have been 1K or more.
Now have a solid state computer that is very fast and uses less power Beer Cheers

Surfer_kris Mon Sep 15, 2014 1:10 am

Good to know, I have a MacBook Pro, and I avoid doing too many system upgrades in order to not slow it down too much.

The battery is just getting worse and worse though, are there any cheap batteries available?

crankbndr Mon Sep 15, 2014 1:24 am

Check out Other World Computing, they have everything for your Macbook Pro. Be sure to find the exact year and model number of your machine
because Apple changed things even mid year. OWC helps find the exact part. They have nice batteries that look easy to change.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/powerbook-ibook-macbook/

Oldenginerod Mon Sep 15, 2014 8:02 am

Don't use my Macbook much so I don't think I'd bother upgrading it. I mainly use an iMac 20" with 10.5 OS and have been considering upgrading to a higher OS but I'm always very cautious about changine anything because it probably means having to learn all over. It would be too big a jump from 10.5 to 10.9, so I'd probably settle for something in between. I can't upgrade Safari any higher without changing OS so that would be my only real reason for upgrading. Current OS is too early for Firefox also.

Rod.

sdjjadk Fri Sep 19, 2014 2:23 pm

crankbndr wrote:
The first thing I did was install a drive cleaner from App Store, I used AVGs free cleaner but there are others. I ran it and it found 1GB of junk files on my drive, after cleaning my Macbook
was much faster.

Viruses on a MAC?
Glad to hear you were able to clean it up. I've never owned a MAC but I do use Ubuntu Linux which both Linux and MAC OS are based on UNIX and is as close to a MAC as I can get until I can afford one.

Right now I have a 3 year old HP Pavilion with a CORE i3 cpu at 2.13ghz, 4 gigs of memory, 1.5gb graphics card and a 500gb hdd. It came loaded with windows 7 64 bit but I partitioned a 50gb space and installed Ubuntu for a dual boot environment.

Shawn

Surfer_kris Fri Sep 19, 2014 6:31 pm

sdjjadk wrote:
Viruses on a MAC?

It is usually PC viruses that are hiding in the files, so they are not really dangerous but cleaning them out is good a measure to avoid spreading them to others... Smile

crankbndr Fri Sep 19, 2014 11:31 pm

The disk cleaner I used is a free utility, AVG Disk Cleaner in the app store, that clears old abandoned junk and log files that pile up over time on your disk.
It found 1gig of junk on mine and after clean up it speed up my computer so much I almost didn't do the other upgrades.
It has nothing to do with viruses (what are those), I use a free virus scanner called ClamX from the App Store once in a while, haven't seen a virus in 9 years.
More and more Apple is locking down OSX, it looks like in the future you will only be able to download program files through Apple.

pkrankow Sat Sep 20, 2014 1:40 am

I wish my macbook could be upgraded...too old. Anyways I fear it is on its last legs since the hinge broke. Time to start computer shopping before it dies entirely. Poor thing is "only" 7.

Phil

sdjjadk Mon Sep 22, 2014 12:15 pm

Surfer_kris wrote:
sdjjadk wrote:
Viruses on a MAC?

It is usually PC viruses that are hiding in the files, so they are not really dangerous but cleaning them out is good a measure to avoid spreading them to others...

I've been into I.T. since the old Apple Day's of the mid to late 80's and Professionally since '98 and I've never seen a virus on a MAC. But then again, I service WAY more Windows PC's and Laptops than MAC.

Shawn

sdjjadk Mon Sep 22, 2014 12:31 pm

crankbndr wrote:The disk cleaner I used is a free utility, AVG Disk Cleaner in the app store, that clears old abandoned junk and log files that pile up over time on your disk.
It found 1gig of junk on mine and after clean up it speed up my computer so much I almost didn't do the other upgrades.
It has nothing to do with viruses (what are those), I use a free virus scanner called ClamX from the App Store once in a while, haven't seen a virus in 9 years.

I use the free version of AVG as well as Malware Bytes coupled with my firewall and I rarely have any issues.
OH and a computer virus is code that seems to only be downloaded by some of my customers who help keep my pockets lined by ignoring a few recommended Windows security precautions. Very Happy

crankbndr wrote:
More and more Apple is locking down OSX, it looks like in the future you will only be able to download program files through Apple.

Other than cost, another reason I haven't gotten a MAC is the fact that a lot of the software I use is incompatible with OS.

Shawn

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