occhicone Posted January 15, 2009 Share Posted January 15, 2009 <p>My wife wanted a macbook and after some debate i am giving her my white macbook 2.0ghz / 2gb machine and ordered a refurbished white macbook 2.4ghz / 2gb penryn - i have a few questions - i use lightroom all the time and photoshop relatively often...will i notice a difference right off the bat between the 2 machines given the same ram? realistically, will i see a big improvement if i upgrade to 4 gb in this machine? finally, i keep my photos on an external drive- do you think i'll see a big imrpovemnt by switching to a larger internal drive and keeping them there? fianlly for real... will i see a big defiierence between 5400 rpm and 7200rm on the internal drive? THANKS</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phoneguy Posted January 15, 2009 Share Posted January 15, 2009 <p>A straight across trade between the two will not be huge.<br> A faster internal drive (7200rpm) will be quite a bit faster than an external hard drive, and you will see a decent improvement with 4gigs of ram. LightRoom is memory hungry, and 4 gigs works well.<br> The biggest increase you will probably see is switching from an external to an internal hard drive. Another option is an external hard drive conected with a firewire 800, but I think the internal 7200rpm is still faster.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris_werner Posted January 15, 2009 Share Posted January 15, 2009 <p>The processor speed difference will not be noticeable. The hard drive speed difference will be very noticeable. The benefit of adding RAM is more subjective, but as a general rule, adding RAM is the best return on investment for upgrades.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uhooru Posted January 15, 2009 Share Posted January 15, 2009 <p>Adding ram means you can do more without dragging down the speed of the system. So you should get less beach balls. 2.0 to 2.4 is that much of a difference. I don't think the faster drive will make too noticible a difference for photos. Your knew system should still be a bit faster than the old one. I would add the ram.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phoneguy Posted January 15, 2009 Share Posted January 15, 2009 <p>Also. look at OtherWorldComputing (OWC) for your ram upgrade. 4 gigs can be had for $45.99 + Shipping. I have their ram in my macs, and it works fine. Apple charges way too much for Ram.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Uhooru Posted January 15, 2009 Share Posted January 15, 2009 <p>Concur with Mike. I use Crucial, but I haven't heard of anyone who doesn't like OWC ram. Apple will be at least 3x as much.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Carl Stone Posted January 15, 2009 Share Posted January 15, 2009 <p>"Another option is an external hard drive conected with a firewire 800, but I think the internal 7200rpm is still faster."</p> <p>MacBooks don't, have Firewire 800, only FW 400. You have to move up to a MacBook Pro to get a FW 800 interface. </p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
patricklavoie Posted January 15, 2009 Share Posted January 15, 2009 <p>new Macbook dont have anymore firewire.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john clark Posted January 16, 2009 Share Posted January 16, 2009 <p>I've recently 'bumped' my BlackBook C2D (2GHz model from late 2006) by upping the RAM to 4Gb (of which only 3.3Gb is usable due to architecture) and changing its 5400rpm 120Gb internal drive with a 320Gb 7200rpm drive with bigger buffer.</p> <p>I have to admit that it doesn't really feel any faster in drive access times, contrary to what others are claiming, but the extra RAM makes a bit of a difference for things like Photoshop and Parallels.</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
occhicone Posted January 16, 2009 Author Share Posted January 16, 2009 <p>thanks for your feedback guys...<br> i had ordered from OWC before and could not have been more happy. When i went from 1 to 2Gb in my macbook, i saw a remarkable difference. I am going to get the 4 for this newer macbook from them as well. <br> john - did you ever use an external drive? if so, did you see a big difference between that and the internal drive (either of the 2 you mentioned)?<br> has anyone else compared a 5400rpm and 7200rpm drive in their machines? the cost difference between the 2 i am looking at is about 50 bucks - if it makes i difference, not a big deal...but keep an extra 50$ in the pocket is always good! </p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
john clark Posted January 20, 2009 Share Posted January 20, 2009 <p>Christopher: yes, I would say my external FW400 drive (3.5" 7200rpm 16Mb cache) is quicker than either of the 2.5" drives, and to be honest I don't see a huge difference in the performance of the 320Gb from the 120Gb internal drives. But I said that already... mind you, I'd still plump for the 7200rpm option if I were to do it again. I reckon it will be faster for large files, such as movies, and it's also got a bigger standard cache than my previous drive.</p> <p>What is worth noting is that my battery life hasn't noticeably reduced on moving from a 5400rpm drive to a 7200rpm drive. I expected a hit but I really am not seeing it. I still get 2 hours or so (from my two-and-a-bit-year-old Macbook battery)</p> Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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