Tag Archives: Macbook Pro

Speeding Up My Old Macbook Pro

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apple macbook pro Speeding Up My Old Macbook Pro

I am currently using a Macbook Pro which I bought a little over 2 years ago. It runs on a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz Intel Processor and has 200Gb of storage space and 2Gb of RAM. Sounds geeky right? Well, this post is meant to be a little bit on the geekier side of things.

Anyway, 2 years a long time and is almost a lifetime for more electronic products but of course I am trying to maintain using my Mac longer and abstain from upgrading to the newer unibody Macs sporting those spanking new Core i5/i7 processors.

I mainly use my laptop to process photo images, that means I would have Photo Mechanic, Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop running at the same time with Google Chrome, iTunes and Tweetdeck running in the background. This used to work out fine until I upgraded from Leopard to Snow Leopard, Lightroom 1 to 2 and now 3 and from Adobe Photoshop CS3 to Adobe Photoshop CS4. Same goes for the size of my images. It started off with a 10mp camera to a now 21mp camera.

This definitely put a strain on my laptop and I can definitely feel it moving extremely slowly nowadays. Of course the easy route is to just get a new laptop but throwing that kind of money about isn’t in any of my current plans. So I went off about to figure out what can I do to improve the speed of my Mac and keep it running longer.

There are two ways of speeding it up of course, the hardware route as well as the software route.

Let’s begin with the hardware route.

Upgrading the memory

I upgraded the memory capacity of my laptop from 2Gb of RAM to its maximum which is 4Gb of RAM. This definitely allows me to open more applications simultaneously and Lightroom runs a little bit smoother.

Upgrading the hard disk

This will be my next upgrade, you can choose to upgrade from the stock standard 5400rpm hard disk to a much speedier 7200rpm hard disk or if you have the cash and storage space is not an issue, you can opt for a SSD (Solid State Drive). Personally, I am very much looking forward to this, the Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid hard disk. I really can’t wait to get ahold of this baby once it reaches Malaysian shores. It is a hybrid hard disk which sports a 4Gb NAND flash on it and still be able to store 500Gb of data. Proven via benchmarks to be much faster than conventional 7200rpm drives, this drive would definitely speed up my laptop. I just hope that by the time it arrives, my laptop can support it. From my sources, Cycom at Lowyat plaza is selling the 500Gb version for RM700 which is quite a lot as the US pricing is only priced at USD$89.00.

Other than these hardware upgrades, I can’t really think of other ways to improve my Mac anymore. So the next thing I need to look at is on the software side.

Onyx

Get this application directly from Apple and for free! It is a multifunction utility for Mac OS X Intel. It allows you to verify the Startup Disk and the structure of its System files, to run misc tasks of system maintenance, to configure the hidden parameters of the Finder, Dock and of some of Apple’s own applications, to delete caches, to remove a certain number of files and folders that may become cumbersome and more.

Mac Keeper

Not just an ordinary app. It is an all-in-one solution for your Mac that combines a set of drive clean-up utilities, standalone tools, and online services. Simple and powerful, this app will make work easier for beginners and give more flexibility to experts.

Why MacKeeper? You will never have to complain about lack of disk space, slow system performance, accidental file loss, privacy breaches, or be confused with any Mac-related questions.

I managed to recover about 20Gb of hard disk space using Mac Keeper. To some of you, 20Gb is not much but to me where I usually have around 5Gb of  free hard disk space, 20Gb represents 10% of my entire storage space.

Download it here.

Remove fonts you never use

If you don’t work with plenty of languages, you can always remove languages that you wouldn’t use. Trust me, there are a lot of them! You can either move them out of the fonts folder or you can use Mac Keeper or Monolingual to do that job for you.

Stop unused extensions

What is the use of turning on Wifi, Bluetooth, filesharing and internet sharing when you aren’t using them? Then open the Extensions Manager control panel via Systems Preferences and turn off the various system extensions that you don’t need.

Disable the Widgets Dashboard

I used to think that Widgets are cool but after a while, I totally forgot about it’s existence and hardly even check it. Hence why I decided to just kill it off completely. Those little buggers can be a system resource hogger.

  • Open up terminal.app located in Applications > Utilities > Terminal
  • Copy this, paste it in the terminal and hit enter: defaults write com.apple.dashboard mcx-disabled -boolean YES
  • Then enter this: killall Dock
  • That’s it! Dashboard widgets are now disabled

Other wise, you can also follow this guide here on how to disable the widgets using your mouse.

Here are some of the ways that I managed to find and source out in order to speed up my old Mac. If you have any tips and tricks, I would definitely want to hear what your solutions were and I would definitely love to try them out as well. Any method especially if it doesn’t involve buy a whole new laptop.

Wednesday Clicks

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This week on Wednesday Clicks I am proud to give you a new word to learn, “Boudoir”. What is it you ask me? Well it has something to do with this style of photography which I am unsure if many male photographers get to shoot. Most of the ones posted on the web were usually taken by famous female photographers. Anyway, just an interesting point to note. If you are still clueless about what “Boudoir” means, just click on the first link.

  • Jasmine Star’s recent Boudoir shoot
  • Last week both Scott Kelby and Matt Klowk…er…that Lightroom guy, anyway, they are part of this new online web resource/TV called D-Town TV where they had their premier episode last week. Check it out here.
  • Check out this competition, it’s called “Name your dream assignment” which is organised by Lenovo and Microsoft. Huge prizes to be won.
  • Learn how to shoot rock concerts here.
  • Apple has released their new line of Macs on Tuesday, “new” Macs include the ever elusive Mac Mini, new iMacs, a bumped up Macbook Pro and the Mac Pro.
  • PSP2 is underway? Images do look fantastic though.

That’s it for this week. Back to the rat race!

How Apple keeps us wanting more!

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Another 6 months have passed since I’ve gotten my MacBook Pro and now Apple is at it again, releasing a whole new line of MacBook Pros and MacBooks. This time, there were some big changes for the MacBook line. First of all, Apple has shed their desire for white plastic electronic items in every household, only to replace them with a greener and slicker looking aluminium finish.

overview hero20081014 How Apple keeps us wanting more!

The new MacBook shown above

Several changes can easily be spotted starting with the black bordered LCD screens and wait a minute, the new MacBook looks like the younger sibbling of the MacBook Pro.

mbp How Apple keeps us wanting more!

I bet you can’t tell the difference between the two photos here!

In previous designs, the MacBook was distinguished as a fashion icon whilst the MacBook pro has always been designed for a classy and yet professional look. While that still remains the fact, the new fashion statement in notebooks these days are simplistic design with a hint of minimalistic touch and yet boasting enough features to blow the average consumer’s mind away.

New improvements include having the DVD slot moved from the front to the side in order to cater for it’s new battery design and easy removability as well as upgrade options to include a SSD drive. Another new feature which I think is extremely useful is the battery indicator.

Another new item which caught my eye is the new 24″ Apple Cinema display. Of course designed in theme with the new notebooks, the ACD is sporting a black border as well with the theme that it was designed with MacBooks in mind.

24inch How Apple keeps us wanting more!

The advert shows it all!

Judging from the size, this is something I am really interested in but of course I shall wait for a full and comprehensive review on it about it’s colour and image processing performance.

With all of these new radical changes, Apple continues to be the market leader (IMHO) in gadget designs which are known to be iconic. From the 1st generation iPod to the early days of the Macbook, Apple continues to impress me. The only downside was that rumours did say that Apple might release a sub $899 notebook but the only news was that the older Macbook stock would be sold off at $999 instead. If Apple did manage to release a sub-$899 Macbook, I can easily see Apple grabbing larger pieces of the notebook market share.

More details on the MacBook and MacBook Pro can be found here.

Image source: Apple.com

Penang, oh Penang!

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Ah the 11th of April has finally arrived. It didn’t really help since I was stuck in the office last night with some catching up to do (I will be away the whole of next week attending another workshop). Yesterdat was the day that I began my hectic schedule.

Well its not like this week has been a walk in the park. With many deadlines to meet and constantly being at meetings in work, I have been leaving the office late at night that I didn’t have the time to make it for cell and even my Thursday night golf lessons which sucked. Last weekend was a dream as I had my company’s annual dinner and dance last Friday night and guess what? I won a Nintendo Wii during the lucky draw. This was my first ever lucky draw win in my life

The following bits were actually written yesterday so try not to mind the present tense grammar from this point onwards.

Recap….

9.00am and I am already sipping on my coffee looking through the various emails in my work inbox and as I slowly watch the time before starting my teleconference with my senior manager in Singapore, I decided to make sure that everything is going fine.

Well for one thing which has me smiling at work today (it looked like I had slept with a clothes hanger in my mouth) was that my new baby arrived. I am typing this bit of post on it right now and I am really trying to get used to the new keyboard shortcuts.

By 11.40am I was ready to head to the airport and thanks to my good buddy Vincent who agreed to send me to the LCC Terminal, I was all set and ready to go. Of course like all good planning, things go wrong. Nothing wrong occurred of course but we got held up a little bit but I still managed to reach the LCC terminal on time and checked in with plenty of time to spare.

Lunch was at McDonalds and yes, I lost the best. I was supposed to stay away from fast food for two months and after a week, I gave in. Well, it wasn’t entirely my fault, there isn’t any place to eat in the LCC Terminal! Everywhere was packed with people and I had no choice to eat at McDonalds because I was short of time and the customer turnaround there was way quicker than the other place.

The wonders of AirAsia and the relatively cheap flights, recently they have been checking every passenger’s hand luggage to check if they exceed the weight limit and it seems that they were charging the passengers additional costs for each additional kg over the weight limit. A bold move indeed by Mr. Tony Fernandes.

I reached Penang on time and with no problems, the airport was relatively full with passengers waiting to board the plane and the duty free shops looked tempting. To me, the first thing I wanted to do was check into the apartments I am staying in and taking a nice cool shower.

The taxi cost was about RM47.00 which was a little steep if you ask me considering Penang is a small island but the worst has yet to come. Not only did the taxi booth charged me RM47, they really shouldn’t put the sign “LIMO” on it because the taxi I sat in was far from what one would even call a decent car. But hey, who am I to complain? I flew all the way to Penang just to learn and absorb from one of the reknowned wedding photographers in Malaysia and soon to be Asia.

After 10 minutes of sitting in the taxi whilst trying not to concentrate on how run down the taxi was (it was the old stretched proton saga where the rear seat passengers have a little more leg room), I started to smell something weird. Turned out that the taxi’s air condition failed and there was some electrical short. Being the usual me, I just told the taxi driver who was a nice old malay man that we can just wind down the window and get some nice fresh air.

Contrary to fresh air, Penang ain’t a place which offers fresh air. Other than the usual busses and their wonderful exhausts, the heat was getting to me but that didn’t bother me. Thank God that I remembered to bring my trusty iPod along and I was catching an episode of CSI New York. The only thing was that I kept getting distracted because the taxi driver didn’t know exactly where the apartments was and I had to show him some directions.

I stayed in the same apartments a long time ago, way back in 1999 after my SPM examination where me and a group of my friends from school took a road trip up to Penang and spent a week there. We travelled by train (overnight!) and it was an awesome experience. Ever since then, Penang has changed so much with plenty of development springing about everywhere.

Anyway it might seem that I have a lot to write but that is because I have an hour to kill before I start heading out to the workshop and run a couple of errands before that. Sadly there isn’t any internet connection at where I am staying and it really made me wish that I had those wireless connection thingamajigs. If I can’t find a place with free wireless internet, I guess this post might only be up on Monday.

Until then, its about time to head out for my workshop. I predict that something inside of me will definitely change and it will definitely be credited to this workshop I attended.

pixel Penang, oh Penang!