In my Christ­mas list my top item was the new 13″ Mac­Book. I’ve decided to wait on buy­ing a new com­puter, and instead I’ve been upgrad­ing my cur­rent Core­Duo Mac­Book to get some extra mileage out of it.

First of all, I’ve been hav­ing prob­lems with my Air­port card ever since upgrad­ing to Leop­ard. Sub­se­quent updates to Leop­ard have not fixed the prob­lem so when I found this tuto­r­ial I decided it would be worth open­ing up the Mac­Book to replace the Air­port card and upgrade to 802.11n while I was at it. The replace­ment card was pur­chased on Ebay for $25 and arrived about a week later all the way from Hong Kong (with free ship­ping). It was a lit­tle bit dif­fi­cult and nerve-racking to install, but when I put it all back together it ran per­fectly, as if I hadn’t changed a thing. Except that I can use the inter­net while away from my desk, and stream high-quality video over our home network.

The sec­ond upgrade was to switch out the 80GB hard drive with a new 320GB drive from Mwave for $75 with ship­ping. Remove the bat­tery, 3 screws, slide the old drive out, the new drive in, and your done.

The third upgrade wasn’t to the lap­top itself. One of the most com­mon prob­lems I run into is run­ning out of screen space for projects like book design. To rem­edy this, I went Dell to pur­chase the 24″ LCD mon­i­tor from my Christ­mas list for $530 with ship­ping. The screen boasts a res­o­lu­tion of 1920x1200 which is 225% larger than my lap­tops 1280x800. This mon­i­tor costs a bit more than other 24 inch­ers, but for good rea­son. It has pretty much every input you can imag­ine: VGA, 2 DVIs, Com­pos­ite, Com­po­nent, HDMI, and Dis­play Port. Tack on to that a 4 port usb hub, and 9in1 card reader.

All in all, I ended up spend­ing about $650 instead of $1400 or poten­tially $2100 for the Mac­Book or Mac­Book Pro, respec­tively. I could still use a bit more power, but I’m hop­ing that with Snow Leop­ard the sec­ond core in my CPU might get uti­lized a bit more.