I actually advise making a full clone of SL on a separate external disk and upgrade *that* disk first leaving your internal intact while learning about El Capitan. CarbonCop圜lone (, $40) and a spare clone drive, one for the new El Capitan and one for the the old Snow Leopard disk. But if you have $$ burning a hole in your pocket and you do not have enough backups I would invest in an external enclosure like this one that can take any 2.5 in bare drive and 1 or 2 spare HD (like this one ). Installation is not too hard ( has those guides and tools as well). HD cost is less (you can get 1 TB for $100) while SSD can be $0.50 per GB). SSD is notably faster than HD (OWC sells a Mercury series model that many swear by). All you need is a #00 phillips screwdriver and macsales has installation guides. I was very careful on the instruction 'the edge of a spudger to pry the battery connector upwards from its socket on the logic board', and also to connect it again. Followed all the steps here, nothing broke. OWC/ sells good quality RAM that is compatible with macs (and macs act quirky with incorrect RAM). Hello, I just changed RAM from 4GB to 16GB in a MacBook Pro 13' Unibody Late 2011. could this be the main issue?Ī few users on a different forum suggested the thermal paste might need to be replaced.I am running 16 GB. Also, is it pretty straightforward to replace the existing one?Ī few users on a different forum suggested the thermal paste might need to be replaced. I have a Macbook Pro 17 early 2011 in which I use Autodesk Smoke 2012 (student license). I would like you help in finding one that is suitable (I don't need a lot of storage capacity, 250GB is plenty) and affordable. Macbook Pro, 8GB ram, 1TB hard drive, CS6, office for mac. My Macbook Pro still has its original hard drive and I believe switching to a SSD would help the speed. In either case this link seems to be suggestion decent options, I just need to know what to order: (13-inch,-early-2011) I am seeing conflicting information as to the maximum it can hold is 8 GB (2X4GB) or 16 GB (2X8GB).

I am in no way a Mac expert but did some research online and the 2 easiest ways to fix the issue seems to be: I have an early 2011 Macbook Pro (see attached screenshot) that has been acting very slow lately, even after a clean installation of the operating system.

Apple macbook pro 2011 ram