architecture macbook 2010

[zwibbledibble]

I am going to grad school for architecture this fall and I will be using primarily rhino and the adobe suite for the next three years. I may want to use auto-cad, sketch-up, and less likely revit..but I may want to dabble around in a year or two.

My current laptop is a 2010 macbook pro core 2 duo processor. I haven't upped the RAM at all yet, but I am under the impression that if the computer is maxed out to 16 GB memory and has an SSD it maybe be a passible option. Is there any chance that making these changes would allow me to operate the programs I mentioned above? What else would should be upgraded to make this viable...graphics cards?? The computer doesn't currently run very well, with slowness if I have a lot of tabs open in my browser and say, photo shop and indesign running at the same time.

Curious what the community has to say. I'm new on here and am not very familiar with computers, but psyched to fiddle around with this project Thanks for your thoughts!

T

 

[mrmez]

The only things you can upgrade is the hdd/ssd and ram.

These will make a great improvement for general use, but outright power is still lacking. 6 years is a lifetime in technology.

Try an SSD and 8Gb ram for a start. I wouldn't bother with 16. OSX is fairly good with ram, and again, you just don't have the power to take advantage of 16Gb.