Instead of buying a new laptop to replace my 5 year old MBP, I decided to just spend a bit of cash and fix it up. I ordered a new battery and I bought a new hard drive. So far it's been a great decision, my laptop is running great and I've only spent $160. $60 on a battery (should arrive today), $100 for the hard drive, and I fixed the noisy fan with just a little oil and compressed air (that was a few months back, see other thread). The only other thing I could upgrade would be RAM, I have 1.5GB but I've never had a problem. The only thing that it would really help with would be image editing, but I don't do a whole lot of that. My laptop is only expandable to 2GB anyway (yes, it's
that old).
The hard drive I bought is a hybrid drive, 500GB of disk @ 7200 RPM with 4GB of flash and a 32MB cache. I installed it yesterday and copied an image of my old hard drive over. It makes a huge difference! My laptop boots in about 20 seconds, it was probably closer to 45 before (I'm assuming the kernel is being stored in flash). I don't know exactly how it decides what will be stored in flash, but I'm assuming OS files and most frequently accessed user files. So far so good, it's like having a new machine!
This is the drive:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/laptops/laptop-hdd
