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

They may have released a Core 2 Duo MacBook a couple of weeks after I bought mine, but I don’t care. It’s a beautiful machine. I bought the 2GHz version, added another 2Gb of RAM (from RamSeeker - Apple RAM markup is crazy). I’ve got a 60Gb disk now, but that’s just because the 160Gb SATA Seagate Momentus drive isn’t out in the UK yet. Various sites are expecting stock November 22nd, at which point I’ll buy one (£100 or so) and put the 60Gb disk in a USB enclosure (£10 on eBay) and have a spare external disk.

Having a brand new machine is a very good excuse to clean house though. I resisted the lazy temptation to just copy everything across, and downloaded and installed things again. I also re-organised the way I keep my Plone instances and svn checkouts organised, to make development easier.

Here are some of the highlights that I just couldn’t live without:

• Quicksilver! The very first thing I installed.
• TinyAlarm makes sure I actually leave for work in the morning.
• MenuMeters (how else would you know what’s going on?)
• The Missing Sync takes care of my Windows Mobile Smartphone (Orange SPV C600, works like a charm over Bluetooth).
• Undercover lets me sleep safely (don’t steal my Mac, or else) - oh, and TheftSensor is cool, too.
• Parallels + Windows XP + Office 2003. I don’t use this all so often, but when I need it, it works oh-so-well. Installing Windows was a breeze, and it runs better on my MacBook than on my HP laptop. I also put Ubuntu on a virtual machine to restore the balance of the force.
• Firefox + Firebug, for sanity in development (i use Safari for most day-to-day browsing)
• Thunderbird for email and newsgroups. I use Google Reader to read RSS feeds.
• RCDefaultApp to keep files opening where they should.

I’m sure there are things I’m missing, but a big theme is that I’ve put a lot less junk on my new  machine than my old PowerBook has, which is surely a good thing.
For configuration, the MacBook (and other machines with the same aspect ratio) makes a lot more sense with the Dock on the left, always visible, but small. Also turn on two-finger scroll and two-finger-tap as right click. I also have an Apple Mighty Mouse Bluetooth and a Bluetooth Keyboard, plus an iCurve when I work at home.

Oh, and now that the Plone unit tests run in 200 seconds instead of 400, my excuses for not fixing bugs are rapidly dwindling.