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Has your mac been running slowly lately?

After nearly two years of daily use, mine was. I started with a basic Macbook, the first aluminum unibody model. 2.0GHz C2D, 2GB RAM, 160GB, nearly full HDD. I got the beachball all the time and I was considering a new mac. Thankfully, I upgraded instead. Here's what I did, maybe it can help someone else as much as it helped me.

Hardware:

I replaced the 160GB, 5400rpm HDD with a 64GB SSD 500GB $69.95

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I upgraded the 2GB of 1066MHz DDR3 to 8GB

I swapped the optical drive for another HDD. I got the optical bay to SATA converter on eBay for $15 and a 500GB Samsung HDD on eBay 500GB $69.95

Software:

I ran a fresh install of Snow Leopard on the SSD using the DVD, before I put the optibay in.

I used the magic of Mac OS X's Symlink feature. A symlink is like a shortcut/alias except the system doesn't see it as a file; it treats a symlink as if it were the folder if was linking to. Creating a symlink for your documents, music, and movies folders allow you to store all of your data on the HDD while leaving the system and all apps on the SSD. This effectively gave me the performance of a 512GB SSD ($1400 on Amazon) for the price of $139.99 (SSD) + $69.99 (HDD).

Having 8GBs of RAM is overkill for most applications, at least in 10.6's stock configuration. The following tip essentially gave me an SSD-grade performance boost all over again. Essentially, you can use a RamDisk to turbocharge your system. A RamDisk makes your computer think a portion of your RAM is actually a logical drive such as an SSD or an HDD. Esperance DV is a software program that will create a RamDisk and restore data to it automatically upon startup.

The speed boost comes when you copy your computer's most-requested files to the RamDisk and fool it into thinking they are on the boot drive. Again, making a Symlink will do this for you. First, make a backup copy of your Macintosh HD/Users/yourname/Library/Caches folder. Then, copy that to your RamDisk, delete the original folder and create a symlink that points to the RamDisk. The result? Everything is much much faster. Simple, everyday tasks such as web browsing, managing folders, etc become instant. I have even noticed a difference in entering text.

I also moved Google Chrome, iTunes, and my iTunes library (not the songs, just the database) to the RamDisk. The result is around 600MB less of usable RAM, but extreme improvements in everyday computing tasks.

Then, I tweaked settings in Mac OS X to see if I could make it even faster. Two programs will help accomplish this: Onyx and Maintain1. In Onyx, I turned off all animations and useless Mac OS X services. This not only sped everything up a bit more, it killed off all those annoying transitions that are cool to watch the first time, but kill productivity.

Finally, in Maintain1, under the 'Net' tab, I checked the 'quick increase' box. This changes some settings and optimizes your internet connection for high-speed service (no, I'm not sure exactly what it does. Something to do with time-out values). It resulted in a very noticeable acceleration in page load time.

For $290, I made my Mac 'feel' faster than almost any Mac on the market today, that I know of. It proved to be a much better option than buying a new one outright.

Yes, the argument can be made that my computer isn't technically any faster at processor-intensive tasks. It still uses a 2.0GHz Core 2 Duo processor and NVidia 9400M integrated graphics. Rendering video is only slightly faster (due to disk improvements), and gaming is still terrible. However, for everyday tasks such as web browsing, it is many times faster.

Note: Some of the procedures I outlined here are probably risky, such as creating a symlink and moving your cache, not to mention installing an optibay. If you're not comfortable with technology, you should probably not attempt this. But if you are, have fun!

Symlink Instructions: The best way (that I know of) to efficiently create a working symbolic link is by using the terminal. Here is a list of what each of these four commands do:

1. Copy all files in your 'documents' folder into a new 'Documents' folder onto Macintosh Data HD (note, the * is used to indicate a space)
2. Modify the old Documents folder to allow it to be removed (usually Mac OS X prohibits this)
3. Remove the old Documents folder
4. Create a symbolic link where the old Documents folder used to be, that points to the newly copied Documents folder on Macintosh Data HD

cp -Rp ~/Documents /Volumes/MacintoshDataHD

chmod -R -N ~/Documents

rm -rf ~/Documents

ln -s /Volumes/MacintoshDataHD/Documents ~/Documents

The same procedure can be used to move the user cache to your ramdisk, although I highly recommend you make another backup of the folder as well (never have your only copy on the ramdisk, because Esperance DV isn't the best about saving).

Patriot Memory 2.5" 128GB SATA II Internal Solid State Disk (SSD) , REFURBISHED
Manufacturer: Patriot MemorySKU: SSD-128GB-PATRIOTCondition: Refurbished, Availability: In StockWarranty: 30 days General InformationManufacturerPatriot MemoryUPC code
815530011804Product NamePatriot 2.5" 128GB SATA II Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - RefurbishedMarketing Informationa blazing transfer speed up to 150mb/s read, 100mb/s write.
Product Type2.5" 128GB SATA II Internal Solid state disk (SSD)Technical InformationStorage Capacity128GBSeek TimeSequential Read: up to 150MB/s
Sequential Write: up to 100MB/s Shock Resistant: 1500G/0.5ms Shock Resistant: 1500G/0.5ms
Vibration Resistant: 20G/10~2000Hz with 3 Axis
Operating Voltage: DC 5V
Power Consumption: 280mA~330mA
Operating Temperature: -10°C~70°C
Storage Temperature: -55°C~125°C
MTBF: >1,500,000 Hours
Data Retention: > 5 years at 25°C
Data Reliability: Built in BCH 15-bit ECC
O/S Support:Windows 2000/XP/Vista Linux, and Mac OSX
Certification: FCC/CE/RoHS
30 days
WarrantyStandard Warranty30 days
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