Have I mentioned lately…?

An article by Don Quixote    No Comments

Have I mentioned lately how much I enjoy the goodness that is my MacBook?

So a few weeks ago after suffering some permissions issues with her MacBook, Mélaine ended up doing some upgrades on hers and has been in Mac bliss ever since. Well, since it’s the American way not to sit back and let those Brits think they can rule the world again (first it starts with naval dominance, next thing you know the sun never sets on the British Empire, and then it’s all God save the Queen this, and God save the Queen that – taxation without representation and all of that). So really this had nothing to do with envy, and everything to do with my manifest destiny to preserve the American way of life. Honestly, it was my duty… really.

Well any any case, when I originally bought the Mac I had no idea if I was going to like it, or use it, so rather than wasting a bunch of money on upgrades I wasn’t going to use, I just got a base line model (I know, I’m shocked too). Yada, yada, yada, a year later and I’m in love.

But honestly I got tired of having < 10 gigs free on ye old hard drive (since normally I am downloading at least that much at any one given point in time). I found my way over to MacSales.com and ordered myself a new WD 250 gig hard drive, an external SATA kit, and 2 gigs of memory.

It showed up the next day (yeah Illinois, you’re now of my states to invade list).

Now I’ve built quite a few PCs in my day (including the now infamous into my desk model), so upgrades don’t really scare me, but I’ve never really dived into a notebook computer. Normally when I wander into areas of the upgrade world that I don’t want to tread, I call my good friend Bobby to the rescue (he having built the last 2 computers I purchased). The nice thing about my Mac, I didn’t even have to break up a sweat to do any of the work.

I opened the battery bay, removed 3 screws, popped to levers and the memory upgrade was pretty much done. I pulled a tab, slide out the drive, undid 4 torx screws, swapped the drive, redid the screws, slid the new drive in, tucked the tab, replaced the 3 screws and that was it. Pressed the power button and blam-o, I’m back in action.

Nice.

Now I did do some preplanning to make things go super smooth. I installed the new drive first in the the SATA external drive kit, installed Leopard, and then ran the migration assistant to copy over all the programs and settings from my current drive (took about 2-3 hours), but everything I had before, I have again, so life is good.

I love my Mac (and I’m a patriot).