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