[OS X TeX] Re: New Laptop...

[LuKreme]

On 25-Jun-2011, at 04:55, Georgios Pyrgiotakis wrote:

> I agree! With the very compettive prices has now on the memory upgrade it is almost a must. I would first consider the Memory and then the hard drive. And Definitely SSD is the best choice, but surely the 7200 will give you a a boost. I myself just got one, last month, and I increased the memory and the higher screen resolution. More real estate!

I just replaced a 60GB SSD in my wife's Laptop with a 500GB Hybrid. It's a 7200, so you get that speed gain in writes, and with the hybrid, you get a bit bump in read speed. This means that applications launch quite quickly but you are hamstringing yourself into a too small drive. I launched Outlook, Word, Safari, and Mail on her machine and everything came up very quickly, except for Word which hadn't been launched before so still took some time and came up with it's "Welcome to Word 2011"  screen. Subsequent launches of all 4 apps were nearly instantaneous, and not perceptibly slower than the SSD. Even Firefox, which for me is generally 

500GB is large enough to hold all my wife's stuff, all the photos, and all the non-video parts of the iTunes library and still leave about 100GB free. With the 60GB I was constantly having to go in and prune files, remove caches, clear downloads, and do other things to manage the drive space.

So, if you go with an SSD, I think 128GB is the absolute minimum, and if the machine is used with more than one user account, that still might be pretty tight.

If the Hybrid 3.5" drives were available in sizes larger than 500GB, I'd buy one for my MacPro.

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