Slim Chants

I’ve been using Ecto to write articles, post them and manage the blog for the past month. I like it so much I paid for a license before the trial ended. This tool is so much more convenient and effective. I much prefer the quick response of a desktop app over an HTML interface which is inherently slow. The convenience has resulted in more time spent writing. I especially like being able to work offline and then publish when I can get connected. For anyone using a Mac I highly recommend it.

I upgraded my hard drive yesterday. I decided to cover all my bases and have plenty of backup. I got started on Sat. evening by plugging in a large USB drive I had kicking around. Time Machine fired up and asked if I wanted to use it for backups. I went along and was prompted to reformat the drive for the exclusive use of Time Machine. Once the drive was configured Time Machine took a backup of the OS X drive. It ran silently in the background. I left the MacBook Pro plugged in to the drive for the evening and TM took a backup (incremental) every hour. I ended up with 5 backups.

I followed instructions I found on the web here and here to replace the drive. As it happens, you need a Torx T-6 driver to remove two of the many screws that have to come out to get at the hard drive. I had to wait until Sunday when I could get the necessary tools to crack the case as a result. Many PC type computers I’ve worked with make replacement of internal components quite simple. Field Replaceable Units (FRUs) they call them. Well, if the difficulty of accessing and removing/replacing components in a Mac is any indication of the reliability of said components, my mind has been put at ease. I had to remove something like 17 screws (teeny weenie screws at that!) to open the case and get at the hard drive in my MacBook Pro.

The video instructions had a step to install the new drive in a USB case, open Disk Utility and copy the old disk partition onto the new drive, so I did that. The I went through the tedious process of removing all the screws, opening the case and removing the old drive. The instructions were very accurate and complete in this regard. I removed the old drive and installed the new drive, a 320 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drive. The old drive is 120 GB 5400 RPM Fuji.

After replacing all the screws to reassemble the case I pressed the power switch to boot the computer and was very disappointed when it did not boot off the new drive. So I inserted the Snow Leopard DVD and booted off that. I restored the backup from Time Machine to the new drive and rebooted. Merde! The drive continued to fail to boot. In the end I installed a fresh copy of Snow Leopard and on first boot it asked if I wanted to transfer information from another image or a backup or network location. I plugged in the old drive (now mounted in the USB case) and chose that. It copied over all the user settings, applications, files, etc to the new drive and I was back in business with a new, larger, faster hard drive, and a spare 120 GB USB drive for music backup.

I’m pleased with the result. My Acer had 160 GB. I now have 320 GB and it’s nice and quick. The new drive cost me $72.99 CDN. Next I’ll upgrade the RAM.

Now my brother has one. My brother is a lawyer. He bought a NetBook recently, an Acer One, for courtroom work. He has an Acer laptop that he uses at the office. He’s not terribly pleased with the NetBook. It came with Vista Home Basic and TigerDirect won’t give him an upgrade to Windows 7 so he’s kinda pissed. Anyway, his laptop in the office stopped working after making a shreaking noise, never a good thing. So he went down to Best Buy to see what they had and the salesman asked him if he’d ever considered a Mac. Showed him a MacBook and explained how they don’t get viruses and how they do’t need defragging and how easy they are to use. So he bought one. He’ll probably off the NetBook now; the MacBook is halfway between a fullsize laptop and a NetBook so it serves both purposes.   

We all got together at my brother’s place for a party last weekend and I mentioned that I’d bought a mac. “What are you going to do about software?” my youngest brother asked. He knows that I’ve been a PC all my life. But the answer isn’t that difficult. Most of the applications I use everyday are available for the Mac, especially the Open Source apps, or else there are reasonable alternatives either included or available. No big stumbling blocks here.

I’ve just begun a paradigm shift. I bought a MacBook Pro, a used one that our co-op QA tech at work had for sale. It needed an OS upgrade and a new battery, and it had some cosmetic damage so I got it for a good price.

Those who know me are shocked, to say the least. I’ve been a PC all my life. (Not entirely true because I’ve been a Penguin for the past five years.) I develop software on a PC for a living. But I started looking at NetBooks, and as an alternative I decided to consider an upgrade to something more powerful than the Acer Aspire 5720Z that I’ve been running Ubuntu on since it was purchased new three years ago. The Acer has a 1.6GHz Dual Core processor and shared video, but the real downfall is the poor FireWire firmware. I am a musician and FireWire is the preferred interface for getting high-quality audio into a laptop. The MacBook Pro has a 2.16GHz Dual Core processor and 256Mb dedicated video. It also has both FireWire 400 and 800 ports. Macs are preferred for multimedia of all sorts and along with music I am also a photographer, so Apple seems to be a logical choice.

I’m really impressed. I can see why non-computer types gravitate to Macs. Buying a computer that is supported top-to-bottom by the manufacturer has tremendous appeal. Case-in-point: The Mac informed me of a software update this week. During the update the Mac performed an upgrade of the keyboard firmware in the laptop. Did I say I was impressed? If there is an upgrade to the firmware of my Acer I have to check the website to find out about it, download it, run a special program in Windows to apply it (or boot from a floppy image) and restart my OS. There is absolutely no link between the hardware vendor and the software vendor. And here is where the PC business model falls apart. A Mac is an integrated unit, not hardware from one source and an Operating System from another.

So far I’m a happy camper. Not everything is perfect. OS X cannot natively recognise Linux disk partitions, for one. But the computer is powerful and fast, even with only a gig of memory. We’ll see what happens when I load it up with four. Stay tuned …