Tag Archives: MacBook

MacBook upgrade

Posted by on November 28, 2010 Comments Off

My home laptop is my beloved black macbook which has a reasonable Core Duo 2.2 ghz but unfortunately the hard drive is getting a bit full due using as my digital photo album…

After a bit of research I decided to replace the 250gb drive with a new shinny 500gb from Seagate.

Preparation

After receiving the drive I needed to clone the drive to new drive, which is pretty straight forward if you have a “SATA/IDE Adapter Kit with Power Adapter for a 2.5 drive” and “Carbon Copy Cloner”.

After cloning the drive you can checkout the drive by booting off the external drive to see if everything is as you expected (press right alt on bootup)… Note: cloning the drive too hours… so perhaps leave it overnight..

Installing the drive

Then you can follow apple’s own instructions, which are kindly documented below, though my drive housing required the use of my trusty torx security drivers bits because it had one of those security screws….. thanks apple.. :-) Ohh.. you might want to leave your macbook turned off for a while to ensure it is cool as the drive is a snug fit.

Anyway, the outcome is I have a larger, faster drive and zipper little macbook… it feels quite nice… why didn’t I do it earlier…

References

  • Apple’s drive replacement instructions
  • Seagate ST9500420AS, 500GB Mobile SATA Momentus, 7200RPM 16MB Cache

    • MacBook keyboard pains and VirtualBox/VMWare

    Posted by on January 9, 2010 6 comments

    As a MacBook user who has used Virtualisation on the mac for sometime now but only usually with Linux based OS, I was forced to use it with Windows recently and I quickly found out how badly it handles UK Macbook keyboards.

    The default UK keyboard mapping on a MacBook are pretty much useless when using Virtual PC emulators such VirtualBox or VMWARE.

    With this in mind, have produced a custom keyboard layout which maps all the keys to right place.

    The only two exceptions are the two OPT keys, which I could only managed to map them to ALT-n keys, so the alternative mapping for these are:

    € aka left OPT 2 is mapped to right ALT 2

    # aka left OPT 3 is mapped to right ALT 3

    To use the customer keyboard mapping, download the .zip, unzip it.. and click on mbkbd\setup.exe and it will install the custom keyboard called “United Kindom – MacBook – Custom“.

    And this me using it… boy did this make more productive!

    This a screen shot me trying it out… :-)

    (link fixed)