Ultimate Macbook Pro Upgrade

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Posted on : 08-08-2008 | By : Dom | In : apple

As you may have read last year, I got a new Macbook Pro. With it came 2GB RAM, and a 120GB hard drive.

Needless to say, that space quickly got used up, and I started spending a lot of time deleting iTunes content, and backing up stuff to DVD’s and my MyBook. I played with the idea of upgrading the drive a lot, but always held back because I have AppleCare and there is a chance it could void my warranty, or cause problems if I ever have to take this machine in. 

But this isn’t a post of regrets, its a post of action. The action being I finally took the plunge. The price was right so I ordered a Western Digital 5400rpm 320GB laptop drive and it arrived swiftly last week. I really couldn’t wait so I immediately formatted it, and started to clone my current drive over using SuperDuper. Three hours later and it was ready. I did a quick check and booted from it via USB. All was good so I was ready for the replacement.

I followed some instructions from iFixit.com and got to work. The whole process took about 90 minutes in total, and that was being very cautious and taking it slowly.

So what gems of advice can I pass on? Screws! The biggest issue is all the screws. In total, there are 8 sets of screws from around the laptop. I had a small screw box/pill box that I used to keep each type apart, and put them in the pot in the order I took them out. This made it easy to put it back together.
I would also make sure you put down a towel or cloth to lay the laptop on. You’ll be moving it around to access all the screws and the last thing you want is scratches when you’re done.

The last bit of trouble I had was removing the hard drive cable from the drive itself. Its a thin plastic cable that is glued to the top of the drive. In an ideal world you have a spudger, a small plastic tool you can use to separate the cable from the drive. I had none so I had to make do with a business card and then a pen lid when the card got too messed up. So before you delve in, make sure you have something to hand. And don’t be too worried about pulling the cable with your hands if you need to. Its fairly robust so will probably come off in your hand if you’re slow and careful.

That was the difficult part. I also bought 4GB RAM from Play.com as recommended by WIl Harris on ChannelFlip.com. Replacing this was easy as removing the battery and taking out 3 screws. Its possibly the ONLY user replaceable part of a Macbook Pro. And that is what perplexes me. Why does the high end machine have to be so difficult to replace a hard drive on? You’re paying more and are likely to be a bit more technically minded, so why is it such a pain and why does it void your warranty? That I will never understand.

But the final story is that I have a 2.2GHz C2D Macbook Pro with the biggest hard drive I can get, and the most RAM it can take. Its a true powerhouse to me.

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Leopards in my house!

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Posted on : 29-01-2008 | By : Dom | In : macosx, tech

Don’t worry, its not actual Leopards. Monday was pay day and my treat for the month was to get Leopard. Obviously its been out since October 29th but I wanted to save getting it till later. I had two main reasons.

1. Save my money
2. Wait till I had an external drive (Christmas present) and could do a backup.
 
So here’s the tale of my upgrade.
 
I started off by clearing as much bumff off my laptop onto my external drive. This mainly consisted of movies and torrents I was in the middle of. Then I used SuperDuper to do a clone of my hard drive to a disk image on the Western Digital 500GB MyBook Premium drive, hooked up via Firewire (because it is supreme over USB2.0!). This turned out to be a bit of a mistake but I will come to that later.
Next, I was ready to install Leopard. I had chosen to do a Clean Install over an upgrade because my current user account was partially migrated from my old Pre-Intel Powerbook G4 (that was a lovely machine). My hard drive had crashed and I had only managed to retain a small portion of my data. Luckily I had most of it saved on various DVD’s, and on my iPod (iTunes library). So I wanted to clean install to ensure that all permissions were correctly set, and also to clear up some of the crap that got added to it during various Terminal adventures.
So I clean installed. This took about 40 minutes maybe to wipe and install the OS. Then I went through the setup proceedure. I had sought advice from the MMUG and Drew gave me some good words of advice. So I set up my first user with the same shortname as my old. Now as you may not know, your account has a Name (i.e John Smith) and a shortname which unix uses to assign permissions to, and creates the basis for your home directory and preferences (i.e johnsmith). I used the same shortname for my new account, and booted into Leopard.
My next stop before getting my data back was to get the majority of my applications installed and up to date. I ran Software Update twice (which took a while. Thanks Virgin Media!) and was done. Then I needed to reinstall iLife ’06 from my Macbook Pro Install DVD’s. This took a while too (30 mins maybe) and then I was good to go. One more Software Update for iLife and we’re there. (I will probably update iLife in the coming months).
So I was now ready to migrate my data. I plugged in my external drive, mounted my backup image, and ran Migration Assistant. I selected the disk image, and it correctly found all the user accounts. At first I was confused as it said I needed another 2.5GB of space free, which seemed crazy since my user folder was only 73GB and I had 95 to spare. I selected my user name and continued. I was then told that as the shortname already existed, I could import to a new user/shortname, or do nothing. Well that was no good. There second option was actually grayed out and that was what I wanted. Import settings and files into existing account. But I couldn’t do that while logged in with it. So I quit MA, went into System Preferences and set up a temporary account, logged out, logged back in as that, and ran MA again. Sucess! I can select the second option. So I carried on and was finally at the end, where I could import my files. I was told it would take about 4 hours. Fine, I can go to bed,  but in reality that time dropped quickly and became 1 hour 35 minutes. Fine I’ll wait up.
So come 1.30am it was done. Account data back in, and most of my apps installed.
 
 So what have I learnt as I now look to upgrade my GF’s Macbook? Well I think it would be easier if I had just partitioned a 120GB drive on my external HD and cloned to that, then I could just import during setup and all be fine. But hey we live and learn. 
 
So will this affect how I upgrade my gf’s laptop? Not in the slightest cos I’m just going to do a standard upgrade after backup to image. She has no legacy stuff so she should be fine. She’s a normal user, no terminal craziness or hackery. 
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