A month or so ago, I installed a new, bigger, and faster hard drive in my MacBook Pro, the laptop which is my primary computer and blogging platform. It required opening the case and mucking around inside. It worked. It also left me somewhat emboldened.

So with my birthday looming, I decided to go the next step and ordered a 120 GB solid state drive from Other World Computing, along with a special mounting bracket that replaces the built-in optical drive. When the box came, I ripped into it and pulled out the written instructions. The various warnings and a description of the installation process almost caused me to pack it all back in the box and send it back. Luckily, I watched the video demonstrating the process, which wasn’t nearly as scary as the written description. So I plunged ahead.

It took less than half an hour to open the case, identify the series of screws and connectors that had to be removed, then take out the optical drive, put the new bracket and SSD in place, replace the screws, snap the connectors into place, and then put the case back together. When all was done, it was time to hit the button and hope for the nice chime….Bingo! It started up like a charm.

The next step was to format the new drive, then move all the system files and applications over to the very fast solid state drive. This wasn’t hard but did take a while. The final step was to set my user account on the new start-up drive to the existing user on the built-in hard drive. That was it. Up and running!

Now my computer boots quickly, and opens applications in seconds from the SSD. Reading and saving files is much faster, too, because of the earlier hard drive upgrade. So the two upgrades, taken together, make it seem very much like a new computer. I think the combination of the solid state boot/application drive and a larger/faster hard drive is just about perfect.

Anyway, I’m now inoculated against “new computer envy” for a while, at least.