Thankfully, an 8GB stick of RAM only costs $55 or so, and replacing it is so simple a baby T-Rex could do it (well, probably-I’m not able to test this theory). 4GB is technically usable, but these days, 8GB is really the minimum I’d recommend for someone running Windows or macOS-especially if you use a browser like Google Chrome and open a lot of tabs at once. Shop Now Add More RAM Sadly, you can’t download more RAM-but it’s pretty cheap to buy.įinally, that old laptop probably needs a RAM upgrade. You can buy a new battery for under $100, swap it in with a few screws, and get the freedom from wall outlets you’ve always dreamed of.

If it hasn’t been replaced since the laptop came out of the factory, there’s a good chance it holds so little of a charge that it’s barely useful as a laptop anymore. If it were me, I’d probably replace the battery next. So consider these next two recommendations equal in terms of utility. Once you’ve replaced the SSD, recommending the next upgrade is a bit trickier-a more if-this-then-that proposition. Upgrade the Probably-Dying Battery Don’t settle for two hours of battery life. You never know, you might get a hankerin’ to watch that old DVD of Harold & Kumar go to White Castle someday. These days, you can get a 500GB SSD for half the cost of that ancient, tiny drive, so grab whatever SSD fits your needs and just swap out the old drive entirely. I did this myself, in fact: my first SSD was a measly 80GB, and it cost $200, so there was no way I could fit all I needed on just one drive. Once upon a time, SSDs were so small in capacity that this upgrade wasn’t practical unless you removed the optical drive and replaced it with a second hard drive for all your files. Thankfully, replacing a hard drive is pretty easy on most older laptops, MacBooks included-it’s just a matter of unscrewing the bottom case and loosening a bracket around the hard drive itself. This is the first upgrade you should tackle, hands down. I am not exaggerating: the computer will boot faster, apps will launch faster, and if you play games, say goodbye to long loading times. Replacing that spinning drive with an SSD will make it feel like an entirely new machine. Traditional hard drives (sometimes called HDDs) have long been a bottleneck in PC snappiness. Shop Now Swap In an SSD Say goodbye to old, spinning hard drives.Īn SSD is the greatest upgrade you can make to any aged computer.

What can i upgrade a 2006 macbook pro