My MacBook Pro is feeling its age a bit these days. Getting on for three years. The hard drive makes odd noises from time to time, gets hot and is, let's be honest, a bit sluggish. Which wouldn't matter so much but I currently use it as my desktop, hooked into an Apple monitor. Using it on a daily basis has been getting a bit wearing?

On the other hand a replacement model is currently around £1,600 or so. Mac laptops carry a hefty premium price. Is the old beast so annoying it's worth spending that much money to fix it?

No, not least because there is an alternative. It cost less than £150, was easy enough to do at home, and it works. It's exchanging the old, conventional hard drive for an SSD one -- a solid state, no-moving- parts drive that takes the place of the storage th