A new lease on life for my laptop
I got my trusty Macbook Pro mid-2010 because I couldn't stand using the command prompt all day on a PC any more. I've dropped it three feet onto its corner on concrete, spilled numerous things on it, and eaten no small number of meals at it. It still looks & works basically new.
That said, she was getting mighty slow. With a browser and code editor alone sometimes eating a gig of memory, my 4gbs were looking stale and my mechanical hard drive was making swap memory incredibly painful. I had up to 1.5gb swapping at any given moment, and I do multiple migrations (big data sets) on a weekly basis.
With WWDC (and therefore a refresh of the MBP lineup) right around the corner, I resisted the temptation to violently defenestrate it. But, as another week dragged on, I doubted both my ability to wait any longer and to afford a shiny new laptop. So, I caved real bad and bought a new 512GB Crucial M4 SSD (current was 280gb) and 8gb of memory (2 x 4gb of Corsair DDR3 1066 MHz).
I started researching how I was gonna get Mountain Lion onto some sort of media for reloading my OS, when I discovered the thing that made me totally geek out: Internet Restore. On any Mac since late 2009 that's been kept up to date, you can hold Cmd+R as you boot... and the damn thing boots from the mother lovin' INTERNET.
As someone who has lost weeks of his life to reformatting hard drives (including entire computer labs over the course of many years) this dumbfounded me. I never would've guessed such a thing existed. Up comes the menu: Install OSX, Disk Utility and more. In went my unformatted SSD, and my Mac was booting its OS less than 20 minutes later. Voodoo.
I downloaded 25 apps and installed them as fast as I could click. When I decided to reboot later, it shut down, the tone went off, and 3 seconds later my desktop was there. I sat and looked at it for another 5 seconds before I realized... it was done. Not like "hang on while I load all the things" done-looking, it seriously was fully ready for work. I opened my work chat app and it just... worked.
My first days on the SSD bandwagon have been particularly awesome so far and hopefully it and my new memory will keep my next few paychecks headed for the house instead of my credit card.
That said, she was getting mighty slow. With a browser and code editor alone sometimes eating a gig of memory, my 4gbs were looking stale and my mechanical hard drive was making swap memory incredibly painful. I had up to 1.5gb swapping at any given moment, and I do multiple migrations (big data sets) on a weekly basis.
With WWDC (and therefore a refresh of the MBP lineup) right around the corner, I resisted the temptation to violently defenestrate it. But, as another week dragged on, I doubted both my ability to wait any longer and to afford a shiny new laptop. So, I caved real bad and bought a new 512GB Crucial M4 SSD (current was 280gb) and 8gb of memory (2 x 4gb of Corsair DDR3 1066 MHz).
I started researching how I was gonna get Mountain Lion onto some sort of media for reloading my OS, when I discovered the thing that made me totally geek out: Internet Restore. On any Mac since late 2009 that's been kept up to date, you can hold Cmd+R as you boot... and the damn thing boots from the mother lovin' INTERNET.
As someone who has lost weeks of his life to reformatting hard drives (including entire computer labs over the course of many years) this dumbfounded me. I never would've guessed such a thing existed. Up comes the menu: Install OSX, Disk Utility and more. In went my unformatted SSD, and my Mac was booting its OS less than 20 minutes later. Voodoo.
I downloaded 25 apps and installed them as fast as I could click. When I decided to reboot later, it shut down, the tone went off, and 3 seconds later my desktop was there. I sat and looked at it for another 5 seconds before I realized... it was done. Not like "hang on while I load all the things" done-looking, it seriously was fully ready for work. I opened my work chat app and it just... worked.
My first days on the SSD bandwagon have been particularly awesome so far and hopefully it and my new memory will keep my next few paychecks headed for the house instead of my credit card.
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