MacBook Pro Performance

Every so often you'll read comments from Windows fanboys that Macs are good only for Facebook or graphic artists. Well, this is what I had running on my late-2013 13" Retina display MacBook Pro (2.8 GHz Core i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, 256 GB SSD) as of a little while ago:

• Safari web browser with multiple tabs.
• Thunderbird for 2 personal email accounts.
• MS Outlook for work email and calendar.
• MS Lync for work IM.
• Slack for work IM/file sharing.
• Textwrangler text editor for a scratchpad.
• Evernote for note taking.
• OS X Terminal.app running SSH tunnel to a Linux server.
• OS X Terminal.app for ping and traceroute to troubleshoot connection to a vSphere server.
• ZOC for SSH connections to multiple Linux servers.
• MS Remote Desktop Client with connections to 2 VMware vCenter servers.
• MS Excel with two spreadsheets open for looking up server IPs.
• MS Word to review a quote I got on some electrical work in my data center.

And...

• Windows 7 Professional running in Parallels Desktop, so I could run Internet Explorer and the HP .NET iLO remote console for a VMware vSphere server that is acting up.

I have the application windows spread out across multiple virtual desktops on my 27" Apple Thunderbolt display. It's perfectly stable and responsive.

MacBook Pro Upgrades

Three years ago I bought my wife a 13" MacBook Pro (mid-2012, MacBook Pro 9,2). For the time it was an excellent system, with an i5 CPU, 4 GB of RAM, and a 512 GB hard drive. However, she's been complaining lately that it runs slowly.

I checked it out yesterday morning and sure enough, it felt sluggish, even more so than my mid-2009 MBP with a Core 2 Duo CPU. However, my machine has 8 GB of RAM and, most importantly, an SSD. It was time to upgrade her laptop.

Based on my experience upgrading several older Macs and PCs, a solid state drive (SSD) is the single best performance-enhancing hardware upgrade for an older machine. SSD's have vastly better read/write times than spinning disk. In laptops, SSDs also improve battery life because they draw less electricity.

My plan was to first cleanup the hard disk, then upgrade the OS on the machine, clone the hard disk to an SSD, then upgrade the hardware.

To clean up the disk I ran OnyX. Next, I upgraded the machine from Yosemite to El Capitan. In my experience, Yosemite was a real turd, giving me a lot of grief on my work machine. When I was stuck with it I had a lot of instability issues that I didn't have with earlier versions of OS X. El Capitan seems to have fixed that.

While the upgrade to El Capitan was proceeding, I went to microcenter.com and ordered a few items for in-store pickup to complete the upgrade:

• An 8 GB RAM kit from Crucial
• A Crucial 480 GB BX200 SSD
• An external enclosure for the OEM hard disk, so that it can be repurposed as a Time Machine drive.
• A Kingwin USB 3.0-to-SATA or IDE adapter. I have an older adapter that supports USB 2.0, but since USB 3.0 is becoming more common (and is supported on my wife's laptop), I felt it was due for a replacement.

(The links go to Amazon. I bought them from my local Microcenter because I wanted to get this done in one day.)

I installed the RAM first and fired up the machine. It still felt a little slow so as expected, the spinning disk was the main reason.

To clone the OEM disk to the new SSD I downloaded and installed SuperDuper, which I have used previously to clone Mac disks. My wife had less than 150 GB used on her disk, but even using a USB 3.0 interface, cloning it took one hour and 16 minutes.

The physical swap was straightforward, although I had to grab my precision screwdriver set with Torx bits, because Apple used T6 screws to hold the hard disk in place.

The machine performs much, much better now. Cold boots are much faster and applications launch with very little lag. My wife should get several more years out of it.

Teaching An Old Dog New Tricks

One of the challenges of a career in IT is keeping up to date and learning new skills. For the past 14 months or so, I've managed the primary lab/data center at my employer's corporate HQ, but have relied upon a couple other guys to handle the network. I'd like to take over the network, which mostly runs on Cisco equipment. So, I decided it's time to get my CCNA certification as a way to get my feet wet.

For texts, I went with Wendell Odom's CCNA Routing and Switching 200-120 Official Certification Library. Additionally, the Free CCNA Workbook site has a variety of lab exercises to do.

Although I'll be able to work on real equipment I felt it would be prudent to learn on gear completely separate from my lab network. My first step was to download and install the GNS3 router emulator on my laptop. I was able to find some usable Cisco images by exercising my Google-fu.

But I also wanted physical hardware to bang on. eBay is full of used Cisco gear. This post on Reddit was helpful in deciding what to buy (and what to avoid). Using that, I ordered a kit off eBay containing three Catalyst 2950 switches and three 1841 routers, plus various cables and T1 WICs, and a desktop rack.

One thing you need when working on initial device configuration and sometimes for troubleshooting is a console cable. Most laptops no longer have a serial port, so I and my coworkers have been relying on USB-to-RS232 adapters, mostly the Keyspan USA-19HS. However, I recently found FTDI chipset based USB-to console cables and got one of them. So far, it's been working fine in OS X Yosemite and El Capitan.