optilude

Finally! After weeks of waiting, one incorrect purchase and one purchase that got cancelled as the supplier mis-allocated the item, I have my MacBook - 2Gb RAM (the easy part) and 160Gb hard disk (the hard part).

The MacBook’s are extremely easy to upgrade (well, RAM and disk, at least). You remove the battery, and take out three tiny Phillips screws, pull out a metal flap and you can eject the RAM using two levers and pull the disk out with a plastic tab.

To replace the disk, you will need a Torx T8 screwdriver (a kind of strange pentagon shaped screw, I have no idea why they can’t just use regular ones). I got one from Amazon. This is used for the small metal caddy that holds the disk.

You need to make sure you buy the right disk - mine is the Seagate Momentus 2.5″ SATA 5400.3 160Gb, which cost me about £120. The SATA bit is important; my first mis-purchase was an Ultra-ATA disk (which I actually knew would be wrong, but I thought I’d bought a SATA one), which won’t fit.

I also bought a USB 2.0 2.5″ SATA drive enclosure on eBay for £10 or so. I put the new disk in that first, and used SuperDuper to mirror my existing 60Gb drive (which I’ve set up over the last few weeks) to the new drive, after using Mac OS X’s Disk Utility to format (”Erase”) the new disk. This took just under two hours, for 35Gb of data. SuperDuper also took care of making the disk bootable.

So, with the new disk set up, I simply swapped the drives, and I now have the exact same system as before, but with 111Gb of free space, soon to be occupied by my music collection, photos and documents. And of course, I have a slim 60Gb USB 2 drive as well.

Ah, I love a Mac