Tuesday 14 August 2012

A week on, I'm pleased with the SSD upgrade.

I'd been thinking about doing this for at least 6 months, and wish I'd done it sooner, although prices have plummeted in that time. It's simply a much nicer machine to use, and everything just seems to work better. How much of that is Mountain Lion, how much the SSD I'm not sure, but it doesn't go all jerky like it would sometimes before.

One thing I should say is that it is NOT amazingly quick. Applications do open much more promptly than before, but the OS feels like it's deliberately slowed down so that everything is greasy-smooth, rather than 'instantly' snapping open.

As for ML, the changes of 10.5 seem quite small really, and mostly cosmetic. I know they aren't, but apart from a couple of 'change for changes sake' alterations, it works very similarly to the way it did before. It seems there is a monitor control issue in ML, and hopefully that will get patched soon. Battery life is likely to be quite a bit shorter, though it's hard to tell because the time remaining in hours and minutes has been replaced with a % remaining value, and that's meaningless. The machine gets VERY hot when connected to an external hard drive (even when idle) but that would also cause heat with 10.5 and degrade performance noticeably too as it ran out of RAM.

So if you're considering the upgrade I'd definitely recommend it. If you own a Mac then the recommended drives are the Crucial M4 and the Samsung 830, maybe an Intel 520 series. Prices have dropped a long way, and I wonder now about one for a home computer.

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