What year is your MBP? Depending on the model, you can upgrade a lot more than you'd expect. On our daughter's MBP (2008 15" model) I upgrade the hard drive to a 1TB 7200rpm drive, and upgrade her to 4GB of RAM. Now that puppy screams, and has a ton of storage, to boot. Granted, you'd want to be comfortable enough to completely take apart the system to make those changes, but hey, I worked in the tech industry for a decade prior to joining the Army, so I was pretty good to go.