Not all of us can afford the latest and greatest in tech equipment. Of course, everyone would love to get the latest gadgets! Ways to dramatically upgrade your old system in speed and usability is getting easier and cheaper. We'll be going through a few of those ways:
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#1: SSD
Solid State Drives (SSD's) have been around for years but they're just starting to become affordable. For about 10th of the price of a new computer, you can make it feel all new and shiny with amazing speed, you could never get from silly RAM or hard disk upgrades. With computers average lives being 3 years, you can breathe new life into some perfectly good hardware!
I have a 2 year old MacBook Pro. I purchased a OCZ Vertex 60 GB drive from Newegg. Now you may not be happy with that price to space ratio, we'll get into fixing that later. Of course you could purchase a regular hard drive, with quite a bit more space for cheaper. Just take this into yourconsideration, how many 2 year old computers have you seen that can boot in 14 seconds with 8 programs autoloading. All of the Adobe Suite loads in seconds.
So first step, purchase an SSD, and an enclosure. You should literally take the drive out, put it in the enclosure and leave it as is. This way, if anything were to go wrong, you can always boot into the USB drive, or replace it into the computer. Install a fresh system onto your new SSD, copy essentials from your old hard drive. Oh, and by essentials, I mean not your iTunes library, etc. Now that you have a speedy computer, move your iTunes library, photos, movies and major files onto an external hard drive.
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#2: Leave your external drives at home
So the majority of places you use your laptop probably have internet. It would make sense that you could access your files through the internet now a-days. Of course, you can always store files online or even use services such as box.net or dropbox. However, don't you wish you could mount a hard drive from anywhere? Now it can be done, quite simply.
Pogoplug is a new device that lets you access your files from anywhere. In about 5 minutes your hard drive(s) can be online through an online web interface or a mountable drive on Windows or Mac. Can't be beat huh?