Having been impressed with the performance increase in my work laptop, I decided to give my MacBook a much needed upgrade. I browsed around a fair bit and finally found the Kingston SSDNow V100 128GB drive at YoYo Tech. I did a fair bit of research to find something for a decent price which also had good specifications. There were a few 80GB drives that I considered, however the read and write speeds weren’t too fast on those. I didn’t really need 128GB, however more hard disk space never hurts and the specifications on this drive definitely justifies the purchase!

The main thing to note when looking at SSD’s are the read and write speeds. For this Kingston drive, they’re 250MB/s and 230MB/s respectively, a lot faster than drives of smaller capacities. That’s something worth bearing in mind when purchasing an SSD – if you want something cheap, then it may not actually be worth the purchase since the read and write speeds aren’t going to be that great. You might as well go for a slightly more expensive drive since you’ll be a lot more bang for your buck.

I first started looking at 80GB drives or similar, and most of these were in the price range of £120-130. The read and write speeds varied greatly – almost always the write speed was below 100MB/s. The Kingston drive that I purchased only cost £150ish, so you’re paying £20-30 for about 60GB more and much faster read and write speeds. Definitely worth putting that extra money in!

The process of switching drives is pretty pain free on Macs. I popped off the battery, screwed off the L-shaped panel which also hides the RAM, and slid out the SATA drive. I think removed the small enclosure and fitted the SSD drive in, slid it back in and closed up the MacBook. I had backed up my laptop on to an external drive using Time Machine before, so when I started up with the new SSD, I put the Mac OS X disc in where it gives a prompt to recover from a Time Machine backup. I selected that and had to wait an hour for everything to be recovered on to the new SSD.

There was about 60GB worth of stuff to recover, and once it was done, it rebooted my laptop with exactly the same configuration as I had before switching the drives. I didn’t have to change a single thing once it was finished, it felt like I hadn’t even changed drives at all since that’s how easy the transition was!

Now on to performance. Boot time on the old SATA drive was probably a couple of minutes. It would go past the Apple logo and load my wallpaper, only to take a bit of time loading the icons in the bar at the top. Now, everything is rapid, and it boots up in about 30 seconds. Applications respond much quicker, opening up and being ready to use in a matter of seconds (such as Chrome, Thunderbird, Adium, Twitter, iTunes, etc.) The performance increase is a huge jump from the old SATA drive!

If I had the cash, I’d definitely consider upgrading my Alienware M11x to SSD too, but I had too many games on there and would need a 250GB or thereabouts drive, which are not exactly cheap at the moment! However, for the MacBook it’s been an extremely worthwhile upgrade and much cheaper than purchasing a MacBook with SSD preinstalled, as the price goes through the roof for those.

Safari has been my default browser on my MacBook for ages now. I’ve just never felt the need to change, however my MacBook is 4 years old this summer and with the constant updates to Safari, it’s far from being a lightweight browser. It was getting pretty slow so I decided to go for a change. I don’t consider Firefox to be lightweight, even though I use it as my primary browser on my Alienware M11x and my work laptop, so I decided to give Chrome an extended go.

I’ve used Chrome quite a bit before, and have always been pleased with its performance. I know it does a lot of caching, which is good and bad. Good for faster browsing on websites you visit regularly, bad for web developers who need to see changes on their website – they’re forced to constantly do hard refreshes as I’ve experienced tons of times.

One thing that gets on my nerves in both Firefox and Safari is how slow it is to move tabs around and rearrange them! Chrome seems to do this extremely smoothly with no problems at all. I don’t know why Firefox and Safari aren’t capable of doing it as smoothly as Chrome does. Another nice feature of Chrome is the main page with the Most Visited and Recently Closed pages on, I find this to be a great landing page and like the way it looks – clean.

Next step for my laptop, SSD drive and possibly a new battery! Stay tuned!

I’ve been so used to programming in XCode 3, that XCode 4 seems like a huge jump. The installation is pretty lengthy, since rather than doing a normal upgrade, it does a fresh install. But once I had downloaded and installed it through the Mac App Store, I was in for a little surprise.

XCode 4 makes everything integrated within the IDE. Now, rather than opening up Interface Builder separately, it opens it all up within the XCode IDE. I much rather prefer this, and don’t know why they didn’t try to do this earlier. It makes working on iPhone applications a lot easier in my opinion. I didn’t enjoy having loads of windows open all over the place every time I had to make an interface change or link something from the interface to the code, it got messy very quickly. It’s good to see that Apple took note of it and just made the whole experience easier by integrating it all.

For those who haven’t used XCode but are planning to, there’s something to be aware of. Firstly, it costs £2.99, which is extremely cheap for a development software. However, if you are planning on definitely creating an app to release, then you can subscribe for $99 (per annum) for a proper Developer account with Apple, where you can download XCode 4 for free. The choice is yours – if you’re not planning on releasing an app soon and can’t justify the $99, £2.99 really isn’t too bad to fork out for a comprehensive development environment.

I haven’t been drawn into the hype around SSD (Solid State Drive) drives, until I actually got to try one out. Over the last couple of days, my work laptop had its drive replaced with a brand spanking new SSD drive, and I’ve instantly noticed the difference. It did cause a few other issues, mainly recovering data from the previous hard drive when a caddy supposedly didn’t work, but once that was all sorted, I was noticing faster load times for pretty much everything. General response time has increased too, which is great.

With the experience of trying out an SSD at work, I’m not considering giving my 3 year old MacBook a much needed upgrade with an SSD of its own. Compared to my Alienware M11x, it’s considerably slow and normal applications such as my web browser and email client take a bit of time to load that I’m now growing out of with faster technologies.

I’m currently browsing around on Overclockers as they have some pretty well priced SSDs there, but I’ll continue to look around for a good price before diving in and getting one. I’ll have to transfer everything over, but recently I got a 2TB external drive which has a partition for Time Machine backups, so that shouldn’t be a problem.