Blog of Hamlesh

Upgrading the hard disk in a uni-body aluminium MacBook Pro is really very easy.

First, find a suitable hard disk, I’ve opted for the Samsung HM500II (500GB) SATAII 2.5″.  Personally I don’t think solid state hard disks are at a point where the balance between capacity and cost makes sense.

Now before you start, take a full time machine backup – this really is the simplest way to move your current system to the new hard disk.  You won’t need to fiddle about reinstalling and configuring things.  When taking your backup, check to make sure you haven’t excluded any folders from the backup.  I normally have my “Downloads” folder excluded from the normal time machine backups.

1. Open up the bottom of the laptop – my desk always has an antistatic work mat on it, but take the regular precautions!

2. Unscrew the little holder pictured below and lift it out.

3. Lift out the hard disk (which I’ve already done) and carefully disconnect the connectors.

4. Remove the screws from the side of the hard disk, you’ll need to put these on your new disk.  You will need a torx (Star) 5mm screwdriver for this.  If you don’t have a 5mm torx, you could use a pair of pliers to carefully unscrew them and hand tighten them on the new drive.  Invest in a set of torx screwdrivers, they are worth it, and handy.

5. Put everything back together, take care when screwing the case back together, its really easy to slip with the screwdriver and scratch the aluminium – which will make you cry, trust me

6. Boot your system from your install DVD.  Using the “Disk Utility” create a new partition, then use the “Restore from backup” option on the “Utilities” menu.  Connect your time machine backup drive and follow the onscreen instructions.  it took roughly 1.5 hours to restore my 120Gb system.

I did run into a small problem after the restore, which is apparently quite common.  “Quick look” stopped working, this is where you select a file and press the space bar to get an instant preview of the contents.  I found a fix, and its documented here.

As always, please feel free to post a comment, or talk to me on twitter.

I’ve recently replaced the hard drive in my MacBook Pro with a higher capacity one (write up to follow).  After restoring from time machine I found that quick look no longer works.  If you try to quick look a file (select file, press space bar) you just get a black box.  If however you select two files, hit the space bar, then click on the index sheet button (little button with 4 windows in a 2×2 stack), quick look seems to work – but only in the index sheet.

This is a common problem, but took some forum trauling to find a solution, so i’ll save you the work.

Simply reinstall the Mac OS X v10.6.2. Update.  I was running 10.6.2 already, and it simply reinstalled over the top.

If this doesn’t fix the problem, boot your MacBook from the install DVD, select Utilities > Disk Utility, and “Repair Disk Permissions” – you’ll have to boot from the install media if you are repairing the same drive that your system boots from.

Good luck – post a comment and let me know if this works for you.  You could always talk to me on twitter too

Recently I’ve been using my MacBook more and more, pretty much for everything, and the 2Gb of RAM it came with just wasnt enough. Now this is one of the easiest upgrades in the world universe to do, and pretty much anyone could do this – although if you screw up your macbook, its your fault and not mine :p

How much RAM can the macbook take?

Using the information on wikipedia, this is straight forward enough to work out. Load up system profiler, in the “hardware overview” section (should be the default section that loads when system profiler starts up), you’ll see the “Bus Speed”.

• 667 Mhz BUS means that you can install 4GB of RAM, but only 3GB will be usable.
• 800 Mhz BUS means that you can install 4Gb of RAM, and use all of it

What RAM do I need?

Refer to this Apple knowledge base article, I have the standard MacBook (ie: not the unibody aluminium thing), so for mine its;

• DDR SO-DIMM (30mm)
• PC2-5300 DDR2 667 MHz 200 PIN

I grabbed two of these from ebuyer.com, £39.20 inc VAT and next day delivery, which isn’t bad at all for 4Gb of RAM

How do I install it?

Really, this was the simplest thing in the world to do. I think this could actually be less complicated than tieing your shoelaces, so if you can do up your own shoes, and if you can use the interwebs, this shouldn’t cause you any sort of issue – if it does, sign up for “special school”.

1. SHUTDOWN – don’t hibernate
2. Take the battery off
3. Remove the three screws across the top edge, remove panel
4. Pull out the levers and eject the RAM
5. Insert new RAM (be sure to put them in the right way around)
6. Replace panel, replace screws, replace battery
7. Boot up and be happy

^-Removing the three screws across the top edge

^-Ejecting the installed RAM

^-Insert new RAM – NOTE ORIENTATION (notch is on the left hand side)

All done

Oh and obviously, don’t be super cheap, replace the RAM in pairs, for less than £40, its well worth doing it right.

Find the post useful? Don’t be a schmuck, post a comment.

PS: Sorry for the poor quality pics, only have by BlackBerry camera on me.

Photo booth camera not working?

Right, so theres a problem that seems to be all over the internet, and on lots of mac user forums, even the Apple site has an article on it. If you’ve found this, you know the problem, but heres a recap;

1. Photo Booth wont start the camera/iSight automatically, and doesn’t seem to respond.
2. iChat and other programs that use the camera work fine.
3. You’ve tried the CMD-OPT-P-R restart “thing” to clear your SMC.

Nothing seems to work right?

Well, one of my clients had the same problem today, and thanks to the genius way mac apps are distributed (ie: in one .app file), my solution was to simply grab Photo Booth from my macbook, and copy it onto his. Fixed the problem, see, simple is better

Now, where can you get a working copy of Photo Booth from without trawling the web, or looking for torrents, or reinstalling, or rolling back, well here of course

Download Photo Booth – compressed directly from my macbook which is running OS X 10.6.2.

If this fixes your problem, can you do me a small favor? Post a comment, and/or follow me on twitter

PS: Before anyone chirps up about copyright issues, having Apple hardware entitles you to use mac os, and as such, allows you to use Photo Booth, so I don’t see any issue in making the .app file available if it helps other users out there, with what seems to be a common problem that no one has fixed.

Apple’s time machine is a brilliant app. The only downside is that you can’t (apparently) backup to a network share… thats what I thought, now I’ve found a way.

This worked for me, but ITS NOT A DOCUMENTED WAY (ie: use at your own risk).

1. Mount the network share (I have a share at work on Windows, and at home on Linux – both work).

2. Open iterm and run the following (all on one line!);

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

3. Start time machine preferences, click “Change Disk” and you should see your network share, set as a target as you normally would.

I found that sometimes time machine can “forget” the share, then wont let you backup to it, to get around this reset the parameter using the following (all on one line!);

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 0

Follow step 2 again, and all should work – I guess this is the slightly buggy side of things, and why its an unsupported method. Hopefully an update will address this soon, as its really handy if you already have a NAS/storage and don’t want to spend cash on a Time Capsule.

Enjoy