Not your grandmother's 5 year old computer

In a galaxy right around the corner, about 10 years ago a computer nerd could spruce up an aging computer with a shot of random access memory (RAM).  For those who didn't want to spring for the newest computer on the market or get a faster processor for the motherboard, RAM was it.  It was reasonably affordable, quick to swap, and "voila".  You have a seemingly more responsive computer. 

Fast forward to today.  I have a Macbook Air released in late 2010 (although I didn't dive in until early 2011).  This laptop comes with a solid state drive (SSD) that has no moving parts.  It also has a processor that was 2 years old when released.  2 YEARS!  Think about computers these days.  What is 2 years in computer processor terms.  This is like 10 dog years which is about 77 human years! 

What Apple did was take a known upside to SSD's in that they have super fast read/write times for data compared to traditional hard drives, and attached to an older, cheaper processor.  Remember as well, (generally) slower processors use less energy.  Less energy in a laptop is more time off it can be untethered form the power cord.  The SSD's speed made up for the processor's age but you still had a very competitive laptop for the market. 

I have an old 2007 iMac.  I love it.  24" screen, aftermarket 1TB hard drive, 4 Gigs of RAM.  It generally does what I need it to do.  A problem of late I have been having is if Parallels is running (and another user account is logged in) RAM becomes scarce and processing slows to a crawl.  My idea?  Stick an internal SSD with SATA interface for my OS and key applications and convert my internal SATA drive into an external firewire drive.  I already keep my media files on a Drobo so I don't really need that much storage.  

If the MB Air is any indication, for about $120 bucks I can take an old iMac and make it new again.  I won't be pounding away at the newest video game or editing 250MB files in photoshop, but I bet it'll do everything else I ask it to quite quickly. 

This is just a hypothesis currently.  Changes will occur soon and I'll post my benchmarks.  Until then, Happy Birthday.