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How Can I Optimize Speed & Performance On an Older MacBook Pro?

I have a mid-2008 MacBook Pro and (as you’d expect for a machine this old) its running really slow. It has 4 GB of RAMM (and can’t be upgraded beyond that), a 500 GB hard drive with about 100 GB of free space and running El Capitan. I’ve given up on it for writing music and editing video. Now its just used for word processing and web surfing. I’ll be getting a new MBP in March but until then, what can I do to optimize speed and performance on this dinosaur?

Thanks

Kendall
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Kendall

Comments: One Response to “How Can I Optimize Speed & Performance On an Older MacBook Pro?”

    7 years ago

    By far the best thing you can do is to replace the hard drive with an SSD. Unless you can make the hardware swap yourself, you'll need to find a shop to do it for you. But the difference between an old HDD and a new SSD is huge.
    Other than that, you can try to figure out why it is performing so slowly -- but it sounds like you may need some help there too. Maybe find a Mac expert in your area to take a look? It is impossible for me to guess what could be causing it to be slower than it was before. There's no reason it can't be as fast as it was in 2008. Maybe a little slower since today's software expects a faster machine and has graphics and such for those machines. But you should still be able to edit video on it.

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