Buying a new Mac is the surest to get a faster machine. But you can upgrade certain components yourself, too, and enjoy an instant speed bump.
By far the easiest upgrade to perform on any Intel Mac--any Mac at all, in fact--is a memory upgrade. Vendors like Crucial (www.crucial.com) and Other World Computing (www.macsales.com) make it easy for you by providing online tools to ensure that you buy the exact RAM modules you need.
To test the difference installing more RAM in two aging Intel Macs makes, we ran a Photoshop Actions test script, which performs a number of common Photoshop tasks, like resizing, changing image format, despeckling, and many more. This test is key because apps like Photoshop really get a speed boost from more RAM.
Just as easy from a DIY standpoint but a tad more involved--because you need to transfer data, OS X and your apps from the old drive to the new one--is a hard drive upgrade, which can speed up your machine while at the same time boosting its storage capacity. We upgraded the 150GB 5400-rpm drive that came standard on a Core 2 Duo Intel MacBook Pro to a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200-rpm drive to see what performance gains we could eke out of an uptick in rpm speed. RPM stands for rotations per minute, i.e. the rate at which the drive’s platter spins in the course of reading and writing data.
To measure the change in performance, we used the XBench test suite (free, www.xbench.com) to clock the read/write times for the old hard drive, then the new one.
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>Contributing editor Zack Stern's grandmother once noted that his basement storage area is stocked like a Radio Shack. Zack uses those parts to endlessly upgrade his collection of Macs. Follow him on Twitter at @zackstern.
>Michael Simon has been covering Apple since gas prices were less than $1.50 per gallon, which is why he's willing to spend so much time keeping his older Mac running its best with software tweaks like the 25 speed-up tips presented here.
