I've had my MacBook for about 3 years now. It's a plain old MacBook, not a Pro. It's the model from late 2009 with the white plastic cover.
It's been OK, not great, but acceptable. Although for the price they charge, you'd expect a little more.
But in the last 6 months or so, I've noticed that it's gotten MUCH slower and less responsive. Applications take longer to open, web pages take longer to load and you get the little spinning rainbow wheel of death more often.
I was half thinking of just buying a new laptop for $300. Three years is a pretty good run for a laptop. But I couldn't bring myself to do it, considering the price I had paid to buy the Mac in the first place.
But then it dawned on me that maybe it just needed more memory. I checked and it only had 2GB of memory installed. I went into our local Apple store and asked about upgrading. They told me that you can just put any laptop memory into it and that I could do it myself. Woah! The memory upgrade from Apple was $100. I checked out BestBuy and they had Crucial memory for $45, tax included. No brainer!
I ordered the memory from BestBuy and installed it just last weekend. No big deal. Eight screws on the back and the cover comes off. Pop out the two old 1GB cards and slot in the new 2GB cards. Screw the cover back on, boot it up and done!
So far it seems to make a difference. But time will tell. I usually start to notice a slow down after about a week without booting it.
Well, here we are, a week after upgrading, and the memory seems to be helping.
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