Some of you have heard my recent “Mac Woes”.  My current Macbook Pro is about 3-1/2 years old, which by the way is not terribly old for a Mac.  My older Mac that was a hand-me-down to my daughter (with a new SSD to spruce it up for her) when I got this one is now 6-1/2 years old and still looks, feels and behaves beautifully.  But back to my woes!  I needed a new battery.  And quite honestly, my Mac had been quite sluggish for a couple of months, but when I took it to the Apple Store for the battery replacement, only the battery failed the system check.  I did, however, decide that I needed a new hard drive.  The 500 GB drive was almost full, and the sluggishness had not stopped, and while I could not justify the price of a “bigger” SSD, I could justify a Seagate Momentus 750GB Solid State Hybrid Drive (which actually also comes in a 1TB version, but I was impatient and purchased what was available at my local computer store).  Wow – what a difference.

Feels like a new Mac!

Additionally, I got two other little utilities that have made a huge difference.  One is called Freememory.  It just watches to see if the Mac is running low on memory and will either automatically free memory for you, or just alert you that you are getting low.  The other is AppTamer.  If you are big multitasker like me, and keep many apps open at the same time, this can be a real CPU saver.  If the app is in the background, you can put it to sleep or just slow it down.

I’d say the new faster hard drive and these two little apps have turned my 3-1/2 year old Macbook back into a dream machine.