Gadgetory

before you go out and buy a new MacBook there's a cheaper easier way to give your current Mac a serious performance boost in my case I have a mid 2009 MacBook Pro that is so incredibly slow I basically stopped using it so the solution here is to replace my current hard drive with an SSD or solid-state drive SSDs are blazing fast compared to hard drives plus they're surprisingly easy to install so let me show you how to do it you'll need an SSD in this case I have a Samsung 840 Evo it's 500 gigs so I'm also getting a nice storage upgrade a SATA to USB adapter or dock in this case I have a dock plus a screwdriver with a regular Phillips head and a Torx head one will be used to dismantle the MacBook the other will be used to remove the hard drive and finally you'll need a program called superduper it's free you can download it online and we'll use it to clone our hard drive so the first thing we want to do is dock the SSD so I'll just plug it into here goes right in now we'll prep the drive by launching Disk Utility then we'll select the drive from the left sidebar should show up as 500 gigabyte Samsung so we'll select that click erase I'll call it Sharon and finally hit erase once it's done you'll see the new Drive show up on the desktop under the new name and now we're ready to clone so I'll launch superduper will copy the macintosh HD to sharon using backup all files and finally we'll hit copy now at this point take a break go grab a bite to eat because this could take anywhere from 20 minutes to a few hours depending on how much data you have on your current drive the process is finally complete it took us about an hour and a half and if we did everything correctly once I put that SSD in my computer it should as usual so let's go ahead and do just that on the back there are ten screws for along here and a couple on each side so I'll grab this Phillips head screwdriver and start taking it apart here we go I'm afraid to see what's under there aha lots of dust so I do have some compressed air here this is a really good opportunity to get rid of some of that dust now it's time to remove the current harddrive so I'll use the same screwdriver to take out this bracket that comes out and now the harddrive should come out really easily be really careful here though you do not want to damage this ribbon right here if you do that then you really will need to buy a new computer remove this connector here now before you put this aside we need to remove four more screws but we'll use the Torx head instead of the Phillips okay you also want to remove this sticker and put it on the SSD so you can remove this easily if you ever need to take it out again now we'll replace those four screws and do everything in Reverse oh okay now it's time for the moment of truth will boot up the computer now the first time you boot it up it might take a little bit longer than usual but once it's ready it should be a lot faster with the SSD in here Wow iTunes and iPhoto launched super fast my computer feels a lot more slick and I'm so impressed it was such an easy way to boost my computer's performance without having to go to the store and buy a new machine you