I’ve been considering a laptop upgrade since sometime in early 2010. However, in all of the time since then I haven’t found anything that I like and that would be a significant upgrade over the old 12″ PowerBook. The best upgrade I’ve found is the 11″ MacBook Air, but for my purposes it really isn’t a huge improvement over the PowerBook, and I’ve put off purchasing one for quite some time.

Recently, the original 60GB hard drive in the PowerBook let me know it was approaching the end. I could have taken the opportunity to get a shiny-new Core i7 11″ MacBook Air, but instead I bought a Transcend 32GB IDE SSD (TS32GSSD25-M) off of eBay for $50 AUD, or approximately 1/30th of a MacBook Air. While this Transcend SSD isn’t particularly fast by SSD or even SATA standards, it is much faster than the original 4200RPM IDE drive.

The install was fairly straight forward, but there are a few details to note.  I used the iFixit guide for disassembling the PowerBook– I have nothing to add here, and like always, iFixit provides excellent and accurate information.  The SSD fits into the PowerBook with no modification.  However, on this particular SSD it is necessary to set the master/slave/cs jumper to master or the SSD will cause the system to freeze when waking from sleep.  I found this out the hard way and had to open the PowerBook up a second time and set the jumper.  As far as the jumper goes, you’ll have to either cut the Apple plug to allow room for a full-size jumper, or make a jumper of your own.  I made a jumper out of small-diameter bus wire and installed it between the Apple plug and the drive.

After installing the drive I reset the PRAM/NVRAM, installed 10.5, iScroll2, set the dock to 2D (defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock), setup MobileMe to sync my settings* and that’s it.

*- I haven’t upgraded to iCloud, and probably won’t until I have to.  I have a few pre-10.7 Macs and iOS 3.x devices that I’d like to continue using.

The system seems a bit more responsive than with the old drive: applications open very quickly and booting is marginally faster.  I haven’t had the SSD installed long enough to determine if battery life has improved.  I’ll update the post with any changes to battery life and other observations after I’ve used the new drive for a while. Battery life seems unchanged and has been very similar to what it was with the old drive.  While I suppose the four hour battery life is alright, it’s very disappointing when coming from a year and a half of using an iPad that only needs to be recharged every two or three days.  Aside from power consumption, the near-silent operation is a nice improvement and everything seems to run a lot cooler.  Overall, swapping the SSD into the PowerBook resulted in only marginal performance improvements, but noticeable noise and temperature reductions.

I’ve made several changes to the Mac Minis in the last week or so.  First, Mac Mini number one, the ‘early-2009’ 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, was upgraded to OS 10.7 Lion and along with that it got some new hard drives.  The primary 500GB Wesetrn Digital drive was upgraded to a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT hybrid SSD drive, and the dead DVD drive was replaced with a HDD tray and the old 500GB Western Digital drive.

How successful were the upgrades? Well, I’m not convinced that Lion/10.7 is an improvement over 10.6.  Overall, some of the features are interesting (Launchpad, applications that save their state, file versioning), but others are crippled, frustrating, or just missing (Spaces, Finder, Dashboard, Rosetta, Front Row). I can cope with the changes, but what I don’t like are the crashes and bugs. Mail crashes frequently and regularly, the system won’t reliably sleep and Launchpad won’t keep icons where I put them.  I suppose these are the issue one may expect from an 10.x.0 release…

The Momentus XT hybrid SSD/7200rpm drive works just fine, but I can’t say that I noticed any change in speed or system responsiveness. However, the drive was installed along with a new OS, so it’s difficult to say if the drive is any faster than the old 5400RPM Western Digital. Speaking of which, the old drive and new HDD tray (search eBay for 12.7mm HDD caddy) that replaced the dead DVD drive was easy and a noticeable improvement.  The drive was recognised as an internal SATA drive and this is an easy and quick way to double internal storage.  Responsie time from the drive on the internal SATA bus is vastly improved over the external FW400 or USB 2.0 ports.

Adding the second drive also opens the door for future upgrades such as a small SSD for the OS and a large secondary data disk. How does a 128GB SSD system drive and a 1TB data drive sound?

Moving on, I had originally planned to upgrade Mac Mini number two, the ‘early-2006’ 1.66 GHz Core Duo, to Lion as well, but after upgrading the other Mini I decided against it.  The lack of Front Row was the main reason I decided against the upgrade (yes, I know it can be reinstalled from an old 10.6 system), but aside from the Front Row issue, I really don’t see any reason to upgrade.

However, prior to deciding against Lion, I bought an Intel T7200 Core 2 Duo CPU off of eBay for about $40 AUD.  The T7200 is a dual-core 2.0 GHz, 4MB L2 cache CPU that meets the minimum systems specs required to run Lion; this is in contrast to the original T2300 1.66 GHz Core Duo that was in the Mini that does not meet Lion’s minimum requirements. Anyway, the CPU upgrade was simple, and I even got to break out the ‘Arctic Silver III’ thermal compound left over from my PC building days– I think the last time it was used was 2001/2002 when I built the Athlon XP 2000+ system.

So, is the system faster?  Maybe.  Speed (or lack there of) wasn’t an issue before, but at least I have the option of upgrading to 10.7 should I decide to later.