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 that came with the Mac.

<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/412lrhrr0L.jpeg"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-8261" title="412lrhrr0L" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/412lrhrr0L-300x245.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="245" /></a>I've been reading about SSD for a while now and thought it worth taking the plunge (after all you can always return it to Amazon if it doesn't work). What turned up was this.

A replacement drive, an external case for eSATA devices (the format of the drives), a USB cable for the case and a disk with some software on it. The software is strictly for Windows PCs and is a way of transferring the hard drive operating system to the SSD. Doesn't work on a Mac so I had to do this bit myself.

First, I offloaded all my videos to an external drive so that the size of the install on my Mac was around 95gb. The SSD I bought was 128gb so I needed to make sure it could handle everything that was sitting on the hard drive. Then I installed the SSD temporarily in the disk casing and plugged it into my Mac and formatted the SSD as a Mac disk. Took a minute or two, nothing more. After that I used the fantastic $27.95 program <a href="http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html" target="_blank">SuperDuper </a>to duplicate my Mac install on the SSD and make the SSD bootable. This is a long job -- two hours or more of file writing.

The SSD then came out of the case and I <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8HnEUzsTS4" target="_blank">followed the instructions here</a> to swap out the Mac's hard drive and replace it with the SSD. It was a minute or two, nothing more, though the instructions vary depending on the model. I turned on the Mac and, after a few seconds of thought, it booted up from the SSD. Everything was identical to my hard drive Mac (though Microsoft Office demanded to be authorised again -- which it shouldn't have done, this is the same computer after all).

The old hard drive goes in the external case, giving me an alternative 320GB USB drive, one I can still boot from if I want. The big question though is... does it make a difference?

Answer: oh yes. This is the same machine, same processor, same memory. But you'd think it had had some huge speed upgrade. Because the data can get out of the storage more quickly everything runs like lightning. Aperture and Photoshop were at best sluggish on the old system. Now they launch almost instantly, as does the system itself.

For the money this is the best upgrade around in my view, provided you can fit your main disk into the space you buy, of course. It's not just speed either. The laptop's cooler so the fans are less noisy and supposedly the battery life will be better too though I've yet to try it.

<a href="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Screen-shot-2011-04-28-at-09.18.33.png"><img class="alignright size-medium wp-image-8264" title="Screen shot 2011-04-28 at 09.18.33" src="http://davidhewson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/Screen-shot-2011-04-28-at-09.18.33-300x72.png" alt="" width="300" height="72" /></a>So bye bye new laptop. If you do go the SSD route you should check out a few tweaks that need doing after you change. One is to turn off the 'put hard disk to sleep' option in Energy Saver in Preferences. SSDs have no moving parts so there's nothing to sleep, and leaving that checked can cause problems in some circumstances.