appleSSD Upgrade
I've been trying to eke out a bit more life from my now seven-year-old PowerBook, figuring I'll shout myself a new laptop next year after the expense of my looming wedding is out of the way. I was super impressed by simply upgrading to an SSD here at work in my workstation - it boots like lightning now and apps open instantly, so wanted to see if I could do the same upgrade to my PowerBook.
The biggest problem is that the PowerBook uses an IDE interface for its hard drive and finding an SSD version in 2.5" size is not exactly cheap. I came across this review of an SSD IDE drive made by a company called KingSpec which looks to be a really good upgrade, especially in seek times, and as luck would have it they are available on ebay rather cheaply with free shipping (I paid around NZ $88 for a 64GB drive). From reading of other people buying these drives off ebay it takes around two~three weeks for them to turn up, so I've got a bit of a wait until I can install it (which looks like a mission in its own right) so until then I'll run some "real world" benchmarks, such as boot and shutdown time, how quickly I can open Firefox, how quickly a level in Call of Duty loads, if battery life is improved etc. Then once the new drive turns up I can compare to see if its worth the $88 (considering the laptop is probably only worth $200 now).
Who knows, maybe I'll run it for another year or two :-)