Speeding up an older MacBook Air

#1 Tenzin

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Posted 15 May 2012 - 06:10 PM

I have a 1.6 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Air and ever since I installed Lion it's running a lot slower. According to my research the 2 GB of memory it has are not replaceable so the memory cannot be upgraded. Is there anything else I can do to speed it up??

#2 bastion

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Posted 16 May 2012 - 03:08 AM

Tenzin, on 15 May 2012 - 06:10 PM, said:

The abstract answer is that the first step in speeding up a system is to determine where the bottleneck is. Low RAM is a common culprit, but not the only one and I would guess that at this point it's not even the most common. The two other most likely limiters are CPU/GPU speed and disk performance (which comes into play in situations beyond VM usage).

Unfortunately you're stuck with the RAM and processors you've got and very limited on storage changes. (Less so than later models however.) So if you can determine that your real issue is storage performance, there *might* be something you can do about it. Did you get an SSD or HD?

#3 Tenzin

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Posted 16 May 2012 - 04:09 PM

Thanks for the response!

No, I don't have an SSD. That sounds like a good idea. Do you know if that's something that is easy to do or is it better performed by a technician?

#4 bastion

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Posted 16 May 2012 - 07:34 PM

Tenzin, on 16 May 2012 - 04:09 PM, said:

Thanks for the response!

No, I don't have an SSD. That sounds like a good idea. Do you know if that's something that is easy to do or is it better performed by a technician?

The HD swap in that vintage Air seems fairly straightforward from what I've seen, but:
a. I have no firsthand experience to inform that.
b. My tolerance for mucking about inside a machine may be different from yours. The only machine I might pay someone to work on for me is a mini that's more than a couple of revisions old.

Also note that SSD is substantially more expensive than HD, so again you really should be sure that the hard drive is the bottleneck on your system *and* that you're willing to spend the money dealing with that one upgradeable component in a machine that's otherwise rapidly losing viability because of the RAM, GPU and CPU (pretty much in that order).