Monday, June 15, 2009

Upgrading the Macbook Pro 13 Inch

I refused to pay the exorbitant prices that Apple wanted for upgrades. So I purchased 4 GB of ram and a 320 GB hard drive from Newegg. Including shipping the total order was about $120 to my door. Much less than apple wanted and it was sitting on my porch the next day. Nice Job.

Unfortunately they upgrade itself was not quite as smooth. Apple, in their infinite wisdom (or more likely to prevent users upgrading their own hardware) decided to secure the bottom panel with ten precision screws. They also decided to put lock-tite on all of these screws. Hopefully you can envision how annoying it was to remove all these screws. Note to apple: please stop being control freaks and make it, if not easy, at least less annoying to upgrade hardware. Sorry, but the PC makers have you beat on this.

Once the cover was off, the upgrade was straightforward. It wouldn't be hard to figure out, but kudos go the the guys at iFixit for their guides. It's nice to have backup if you need it.

Ok, everything back together, time to boot back up. Insert the install CD and we're ready to go....until it asks where to install the OS to. No disk shows up. Get annoyed for a few seconds thinking I have a bad drive. Then search the menus at the top of the window, found the disk utilities. Format the volume and I'm on my way. Once again, it's just a little thing but Microsoft has this right. OS X should detect the drive(s) and ask which one you would like to use, then offer up the disk utilities if it's not there. I can't think of a reason not to offer this choice. The rest of the install was extremely easy and took about a half-hour to finish.

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