Well.  I sold my 2008 Penryn MacBook Pro last night and got  an upgrade from work:  a 2011 (read: Thunderbolt) 2.0Ghz i7 Quad Core.   Thanks, boss!  Thanks to my neighbor, I got a 10% friends-and-family discount at the first-ever Apple Store and a One-to-One membership, too!  Now I can take those FileMaker Pro and Final Cut Express classes I always wanted!

It does seem like I am taking a bit of a hit on performance without the extra 2 GB of memory and 256 MB of VRAM.  I’m happy, but I’ll be happier after the weekend’s festivities…

When my Kingston 128 GB V100 SSD failed a few weeks ago, I returned it to Costco and they replaced it with the upgraded V100+ (Anandtech review)with onboard TRIM and a bit of a performance boost, and they took $90 off, too!   I was going to order an MCE Optibay adapter to install the 2.5″ SSD in my 5.25″ optical slot for $99 and then I found them on eBay for $29 shipping from New York instead of California!

So this weekend, MicroCenter is going to install my new SSD, a 7200 RPM Seagate 750 GB SATA drive (to replace my stock 500 GB 5400 RPM existing), along with the 2 x 4 GB DDR3 PC1066 RAM upgrade kit I ordered with it from Tiger Direct last night.

I also just found out that my MBP model can accept 16 GB of RAM!  But at $800-$1600, I think I’ll hold off until they come down in price a bit 😉  I will, however, take OWC up on the garage sale of their Mercury Pro Firewire 800 optical drive enclosure for my swapped-out Superdrive–that’s  a bargain, especially considering I have some random DIMMs laying around that they’ll let me trade-in for store credit.  Shibby.

My goal is to beat the Geekbench score of 3800+ that the Penryn MBP earned.  I’ll keep you posted.