After selling my Mac G5 Tower, I walked down to the Vancouver Apple store and purchased a 13′ Mac Book Pro. I was really torn between the 13′ and 15′, but finally decided on the 13′ as I wanted something small and portable. I need the laptop for day to day use including djing, coding, and making beats. The 13′ comes with 2 gigs of ram and a 5200 rpm 128 gig hard drive, something I wanted to upgrade right away. I used my student discount and apple upgraded my ram from 2 to 4 gigs (in 10 minutes as i played with the beautiful 30′ apple cinema screens.. *drool*).

I found it really strange apple doesn’t offer a 7200 rpm drive on their 13′ models, I suppose they want everyone to upgrade to the 15′ model. Anyways, i spent a few days researching different 2.5 hard drives and finally decided on the Seagate 500 gig 7200 rpm hard drive. I wanted a 7200 rpm hd for music and video editing, and all of the seagate tests blew everything else out of the water. Big warning for those that are looking to upgrade, DO NOT BUY THE ASG MODEL, this model will cause mega problems and headaches. Tons of people had problems after upgrading, including loud noises, vibrations, and random beeps. If you plan on upgrading to this specific hard drive, make sure you buy the non anti shock drive. New egg offers the best prices, but make sure you read the small print and ensure you purchase the right model.

The actual installation process is super straight forward. Equipment wise, all you need is a small screwdriver set, and a torx 6 screwdriver. After removing the bottom cover, i realized i didn’t have the torx 6 screwdriver. I ended up borrowing the screwdriver from London Drugs (thanks buddy that works in computer department on Robson St). Check out the screenshots below, it should only take 5 minutes to swap out the hard drives.

After swapping out the drive, I booted up, formatted the drive, and installed snow leopard. After 45 minutes, the installation was complete and i was back up and running. It’s been a few weeks and still no beeps, pops, or errors with the new hard drive. There were a few errors, but they were quickly resolved with a pram reset and repairing disk permissions via disk utilities. The process is is very straight forward, save time and money, save some money and upgrade the drive yourself!

edit: now installing firmware update to allow SATA 3Gbps transfer - http://support.apple.com/downloads/MacBook_Pro_EFI_Firmware_Update_1_7_

Some useful mac utilities:
http://osx.iusethis.com/ – Nice little site for finding useful apps
NTFS-3G – read/write ntfs partitions. Should come in handy for bootcamp users. Works great and is stupid easy to install.
AppFresh – Keep your apps up to date
AppCleaner - Completely remove an app including all its settings and other files like those kept in Library
Adium – IM
Grow – notifications
Perian – QT plugin for other media types. This didn’t work that well for me. I still prefer VLC.
iStat Pro – system monitoring widget.
iStat Menus – I really like the network monitor and the hard drive activity. You can set it up to display the little color coded activity arrows to mimic the funciton of a hdd activity led. I really miss my hard drive light and this works just fine. It also displays temps which you can compare to this list of temps.
Onyx – multifunction utility. maintenance
TinkerTool – easy access to hidden settings and preferences.
The Unarchiver – It’s no winrar but then again what is.
ClamXav – antivirus
coconutBattery – all sorts of neat battery info
Handbrake – great transcoding utiltiy though I mostly use it on my quad core PC.
JollysFastVNC – It’s much faster than the built in vnc client and has an interesting zoom mode.
iStumbler – find wifi hot spots.

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