[pseudoramble]

Same here! My main change was getting an SSD. If you're in this boat, I highly recommend it. If I wanted to really push it, upgrading to 8GB of RAM would probably make it work extremely well.

It's nice to have things that run well with relatively small changes.

[neurostimulant]

Upgraded mine to 16gb ram and ssd years ago. I also replaced the battery last year. My only wish is to have more cores, but otherwise it's working fine.

I wonder if the current MBP lineups can last 8 years of constant software development use like this 2012 model.