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Hard Drive upgrade for my ancient non-responsive MacBook Pro 2.4 GHz

Hi there!

I am new, so please pardon my lack of expertise.

My ancient laptop was called "vintage" in the Apple Store, and they said they couldn't help me (I'm in London). I am going to attempt a hard drive upgrade, because I keep getting that beachball of death when I try to do anything.

I love my computer. I would like to restore her awesomeness, and if possible, be able to access what I have on the hard drive she already has, so I can move my stuff across. Is this possible?

I have never done this before, but I am changed parts on my iPhone, iPods, and I have upgraded RAM before. As far as I know, I upgraded her RAM to the maximum when I bought her. Any suggestions?

I have heard SSD is better, but I am not sure of how much storage my computer will be able to accept, or the speed. Is there anyone out there who can help me? Any directions on where I can find out how to do this?

As far as I remember, I bought her on 19 Jan 2007, at an Apple Store in the States.

These are my current specs:

Macbook pro 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 667 MHz

4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM

Serial No: W875000LX92

Many thanks! Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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The first thing I would do is try to locate a FireWire/USB external HD. These have both a FireWire & USB port so its more useful later on. They are getting harder to find but in your case its what you need.

OK, so now you got this external drive what we want to do here is to install from a different Mac a fresh copy of OS-X ideally OS X 10.8.x Mountain Lion or OS X 10.9.x Mavericks. While your system can support OS X 10.10.x Yosemite the OS uses more memory which may effect what you can run.

Once the drive is prepped up from your friends Mac. It's time for you to use it with your system. Here we want to boot up with it so you'll need to hold the Option key when you restart to gain access to the boot manager. Select the external drive and let it start up. Before we do anything we want to backup anything important to the external.

Once you have backed up your stuff try to get rid of some of the old stuff you have. You want to have 1/4 to 1/3 of the drive free (1/3 with smaller drives). Now lets give this a try: Disk Doctor so you can clean out the old cache & log files when tend to bog down your system.

Try running Disk Utility run the Disk & Permission repair. You may need to run it through a second time. The next step here is defraging the drive this is what I use: Drive Genius.

After cleaning things up you should see a big difference! I'm sure the beach ball issue will be much less.

If things are still not as good as you want look at first maxing out your RAM (6GB) As for your HD I would recommend going with a SSHD like Seagate Laptop SSHD. The reason is the SATA port is this system is SATA I (1.5 Gb/s) so you need a drive that is able to run at this speed. If you review the the drives Spec sheet: Seagate Laptop SSHD Spec note the Interface line offers SATA 6.0/3.0/1.5Gb/s make sure the drive you do get is compatible.

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When you upgrade the hard drive you want to make sure you don't exceed the sata level of your machine. An ssd would definitely be my choice, unless you want a large drive ,even a sata ll which is what your machine probably is would show an amazing increase in boot speed. Do some research to know what hard drive will work in your make as you will be limited in your choices. proper preparation of the hard drive is needed and if you want to just transfer your files over you will need to match the drive size. I would recommend a fresh os and just transfer files. Ghosting drives can be a pain if you don't do it right. If you install fresh you dont move all the crap thats cluttering your computer with you "cleaning house"

MacBook Pro 15" Core 2 Duo Models A1226 and A1260 Hard Drive Replacement

This can be helpful

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Go to macsales.com - These guys are a great and trusted source, and have been for quite some time.

You will see a button that says "My upgrades" ...from there select your machine. If you have questions about this ... click the apple in the top left of your top bar...and choose "About this Mac".

There you will be able to find upgrades / replacement parts for your computer that are specific to your model and have been extensively tested to make sure that they work with your machine.

Also, iFixit has a similar feature and often times you can find what you're looking for there. However, OWC (owns macsales.com) has been in the Mac parts / upgrades game for a LONG time and have a much larger offering.

This will, at least, get you on your way to finding what internals and externals are compatible with your Mac.

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