[iMore Question]

I have read a bunch of stuff online and it seems that since I have a much older MBP i should really update to an SSD, and go up to 8 gigs of ram (i have 4 right now). I haven't had any real problems except for my MBP taking 1:45 to bootup and sometimes 10 seconds for safari or iTunes to load. I have cleared out everything in safari to try and speed it up but nothing worked.

[SprSynJn]

This seems to be a common problem for any Mac these days, not just older models. I have a 2013 iMac and it stalls on me all the time.

[jerrykur]

Replace the drive with an SSD. It takes about 15 minutes.

I did that on my 2011 i5 Macbook Pro 13. The difference is night and day. Boot time is about 10-15 seconds from pressing power button to logging in. Most applications launch in 2 seconds or less.

I also upgraded the memory from 4 GB to 16GB since I run Parallels a lot.

[theramosco]

Update your computer to an SSD. Possibly, the best upgrade investment of all time for a computer. I did that with my Early 2011 Macbook Pro. Added a Samsung 840 SSD at the time. Finally replaced that computer late last year but the upgrade kept it going strong. After an SSD upgrade consider increasing ram to the max supported for your computer.