Give a new life to my 2007 MacBook Pro (help it live longer) TLDR: What can I do to my 2007 MacBook Pro (under Leopard) to make it snappier?



I have a 2007 MacBook Pro (technical characteristics below). I use it for heavy nonprofessional office-style work: browsing, email, Word &amp; Pages, Excel, Keynote &amp; Powerpoint, Acrobat Pro, … I tend to have many documents open simultaneously, so I can easily have 20 windows open and ~30 Safari anf Firefox tabs.

I don't know if my usage is slowly increasing, my expectations growing, or the system aging, but it's gotten to the point where everything feels so slow (notably app-swapping). What measures can I take to improve the responsiveness of the setup? I’d rather not perform invasive hardware changes, so I’m thinking of small small tweaks that could help a bit here and there. And yes, I realize that short of buying a new laptop, there is no silver bullet.

Things I've already done (and, in some cases, corrected):


make sure I have enough disk space for swaping (8 GB free).
check that I don't have FileVault or encrypted swap.
check that my usual programs are not running under Rosetta.
run a cycle of Safe Boot
I could disable Spotlight altogether, which I suppose would help, but I really use that feature a lot, so I won’t.


Technical characteristics:


bought April 2007 on French Refurb
MacBook Pro1,1
Core Duo 2GHz
MacBook Pro 15'
512 MB RAM, upgraded on the first day to 2 GB (= 2 x 1 GB)
75 GB hard drive
running up-to-date Leopard (10.5.$latest)
Well, if it's a MacBookPro3,1 model, then you can upgrade the RAM to it's maximum of 6 Gb. Ram is extremely cheap these days, would be less than a 100$ I imagine.

As for hard drives, you could install a 7200 RPM drive (like Western Digital Black series), again cheap, ~100$ for 750 Gb. If you have a bigger budget and no need for such space I strongly suggest installing an SSD drive, at least a 128Gb. This is by far the best upgrade option you can do on your computer. You won't believe the difference in speed! Check out OWC's Mercury extreme 3G's SSDs from Macsales. They are by far the best out there.

And I would install at least OS Snow Leopard, it's pretty solid and fast. Can't say for Lion yet, haven't tested it.

As for software there isn't much else you can do. Reinstalling the entire OS from scratch will bring you back to it's original speed but machines tend to slow down over time, this is normal. In my honest opinion, the main problem these days is the hard drives that can't keep up with the rest of the computer. This is why an SSD is a good solution to remedy this problem. And if you buy a bigger version or better yet a SATA3 version of the SSD you could transfer it to any new laptop you might buy in the next 2-3 years, it will be even faster.