I recently upgraded my macbook’s Hard drive and RAM. After skimming the Howtos for the past year, it was a very simple process, and well worth it.

The RAM

To start, I had to research the type of memory that my MacBook uses. There are a million websites that will give the specs on the RAM you need. I don’t recomend that you buy the “Apple” memory, as it’s much more expensive than just buying regular laptop memory from newegg. Not to mention, it’s the exact same thing.

It turns out that even though Apple only recommends that you use 4GB of RAM in the white macbook, people have been able to get 6GB working, with 1 x 2GB and 1 x 4GB. When I saw this I thought about it for about a half-second and decided against it. 4GB would double my RAM, and dual channel memory works best with two identical sticks.

The Hard Drive

For a little less than a year now, since shortly after I got my macbook I have been looking at hard drives to replace the one that came in the system. I explored many options, including small SSD drives and large 7200RPM HDDs. In the end I decided to go with the new 500GB 7200RPM drive from Seagate. I was a little worried at first that the drive would be loud or create noticeable vibration, but so far neither is true. It is also running quite cool, currently at 35 degrees Celsius after running almost all day.

The Process

As I’ve already mentioned, it was quite easy to install the new hardware and get working again quickly. There are a zillion tutorials online about how to do it. The first thing you need to do is check out this episode of Systm, all about upgrading laptop hard drives on Macs and PCs. This one is google: http://lmgtfy.com/?q=macbook+hard+drive+upgrade.

Swapping the RAM is a very simple process. Take out the battery, take out 3 screws on the L-bracket, push the little switches to the other side to pop the RAM out, replace it and put it all back together.

The Hard Drive is even easier. Once you get the L-bracket out, you pull the tab on the hard dive to get it out, put the new hard drive on the tray and slide it back in. If you want to restore your documents and settings you’ll also need a 2.5″ hard drive enclose with USB or Firewire.

After the Hard Drive was back in I put in the OS X disks that came with the computer to install OS X. After the install I plugged in the old hard drive, now in a USB enclosure and chose the option to get documents from another hard dive on the computer. It copied everything in my home directory along with all my applications and network settings. When the computer booted up it looked like I never replaced the hard drive at all. The only thing left to do was Software Update.

I recently got a new 24″ Samsung monitor/tv because the 19″ monitor that I was using was starting to seem small, especially since they have almost all 22″ monitors at work now.

Originally I was just looking at how much 22″-24″ monitors were on newegg. When I saw this monitor/tv I thought it would be great for a dorm room.

As you can see in the photos, I decided to go with portrait mode on the old 19″ Samsung that I was using, but it wasn’t as easy as it should have been. A lot of the monitors that are sold come with stands that let you flip them sideways, but mine didn’t. I put together a custom VESA stand out of some wood we had in the shed last night. So far it’s working out pretty good.

Update: By popular demand, here are some pics of the stand I built.

Safari 4 was released today at WWDC and I’m pretty happy with it. There were more user interface changes than I thought I’d see between the beta and the final product. Not that they changed a ton of stuff, but I expected them to stick with the UI that they had in Safari 4 beta and just fix the bugs.

There were only a couple of things that I noticed that were different.

1. The tabs are back to where they should be.
   While I liked the way the tabs functioned at the top of the browser (and the way they looked), it’s just more practical to have them as close to the content as possible. Putting the tabs on top of the bookmarks bar and address bar just means that you have to move your mouse that much farther, and that can be a problem, especially if your pushing the cursor around with a trackpad.
2. There’s a “new tab” button for the toolbar.
   This may have been included in the beta, I can’t remember if I looked for it or not, but I’ve been waiting for this for a long time. Sometimes you just don’t want to press Command+T.
3. The “loading bar”.
   Smaller changes – the right side of the address bar now shows a “loading” icon when a page is loading and fades to white if the URL extends longer than the address bar.

They did take out one small thing, probably unintentionally, that I really liked. When you have multiple tabs open you can grab one of the tabs and drag it out of the current window to create a new window. You can also grab one of the tabs and drag it to another window, if you have one open, and move that tab to the new window. In the beta, since the title bar was the tab, you could grab the title bar, without extra tabs open, to another window and it would add that window to the other window as a tab. You can’t do that anymore, since the title bar is no longer a tab and it only shows the tabs when there are more than one of them.

It would be really nice if you could drag the title bar of a window with just one tab open to another window and have that get added as a tab to the new window. Maybe even let you drag the title bar from a window with more than one tab and have all the tabs in that window get added to the new window?

Update: I’m pretty sure the new tab button wasn’t included in the beta, as the [+] button was always at the end of the title bar.