Saturday, April 25, 2009

So evil...

So I had my 300gb hard drive pretty much filled up here on my Macbook. The solution was obvious. No no, not clean old files off the drive, silly -- install a 500gb hard drive in place of the 300gb one! Puh-leeze, "clean old files off the drive"? Why do that when technology just creates bigger hard drives every couple of years to put them on?

So anyhow, here's what it involved:

  1. Remove old hard drive and put it into a USB enclosure. This took about 5 minutes and required the services of my "Teeny Turner" screwdriver that had a tiny Phillips screwdriver bit and a tiny Torx screwdriver bit of the correct sizes.
  2. Put new drive into Macbook.
  3. Place install DVD into Macbook while hitting the power and holding down the Option key
  4. Selecting the DVD as the thing to run
  5. When the system is booted into the DVD, select the Disk Manager from the menu and create a Macbook partition for the whole drive, then exit the Disk Manager.
  6. Select "Install", choose the disk picture that you get.
  7. Go away for a couple of hours until you hear the chimes. It will have spit out the first install disk and asked you for the second.
  8. Push the second one in, press OK, go away until you hear the chimes.
  9. Plug in the external hard drive (your old hard drive) and press the OK to reboot.
  10. When it asks you where to copy your old files from, tell it "Local drive".
  11. Click on the drive it shows you, then select all the files on the menu it shows you.
  12. Go away for a few hours.
  13. Tada! You're done! You now have a bigger hard drive in your Mac. Select your username and press OK and you'll continue booting into your Mac with all your applications and files. Select software update a few times to update the OS to the latest version, and then you'll be done.
Compared to the same procedure for Windows, the above is a snap. With the Mac, it just works. With Windows, I'd still be trying to get my applications installed again and trying to get my files back onto the system. Which is why, even though Apple is evil, you will have to take this Macbook away from me from my cold dead hands. Apple is, like, the ultimate in Evil -- the Evil whose products are so good that you cannot resist.

-- Badtux the Evil-admirin' Penguin

10 comments:

  1. "the services of my "Teeny Turner" screwdriver"
    Would that be a "Sonic Screw Driver"?

    I always pictured you in a long coat,
    --ml

    ReplyDelete
  2. Shhh! Don't give my secrets away!

    This particular screwdriver was by the checkout register at Fry's Electronics for something ridiculously cheap like $5 and is a tiny little stub of a screwdriver looking much like a revolver cylinder with multiple bits arrayed around its periphery like revolver bullets. It is not sonic, but it is quite handy for the electronics maven :).

    ReplyDelete
  3. I really like my Windows Vista. Ok so I bought brand new hard drive & got a new computer guy to do all the work...so what!

    Well, we use Windows & Mac at work & they are not all that compatible. Why do we bother with this? Because the Mac user doesn't want to switch over.
    She brags about how Mac is superior...frankly I don't see it.
    I'm quessing it all depends on what one is used to.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Oh Rita.
    Rita in the sky with diamonds:
    Truly, use is all.
    So...
    never accept.
    --ml

    ReplyDelete
  5. that is:
    "never -- merely -- accept"
    --ml

    ReplyDelete
  6. @Rita

    Well, we use Windows & Mac at work & they are not all that compatible.Hmm, the Mac will talk to a Windows server, emulate Windows or even dual-boot into Windows. Mine does.

    Your Windows PCs cannot do any of those, can it?

    If you want to use your computer, and spent less time to fix it, then a Mac seems to be the choice to me. I have to use Windows at work, and it sucks. All the time. I use Macs at home (as clients, servers are Unix and Linux), and I can only support Tux´ statement: out of my cold, dead hands.

    Even though M$ is "adopting" Mac OS X (and others) features like there is no next wednesday, they still cannot offer a comparable user experience.

    Unfortunately, the presence of Micro$oft in the market has warped things so bizarrely that statements like your comment are to be expected.

    Doesn´t happen for me... I was there before Windows. Or rather, my first Windows-System was Sunview ;) and then X11. Oh, and Mac OS X on a 512ke Mac I saw at a demo.

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  7. The usual fix for a full hard drive is....(wait for it)....a crash! Isn't there some law of the universe that says that only hard drives that are full will experience a head crash? ;-)

    Dave

    ReplyDelete
  8. I have only ever owned Macs as personal computers. I got one of the first ones through the University of Texas' lovely student bundle program. It was an original 128K machine with a second external floppy drive. I now own a Mac mini and despite the fact that my hard drive is almost full,I love the damn thing.

    So I will echo the penguin and say you can take my Mac away when you pry it out of my cold, dead hands and not one moment before. I sincerely wish I could use one at work but they've bought into the stupid talk and think that MS is the proper business model. Rubes.

    ReplyDelete
  9. Oh, and Apple isn't evil.

    Bill Gates is the anti-Christ and is now trying to get into heaven by being a philanthropist with all the money he stole.

    ReplyDelete
  10. ... I am getting older... Of course I did not see OS "X" on a 512ke...

    For some reason, MAC OS X has replaced the label MACOS in my brain, it seems.

    But then, I only really converted to the Mac with OS X. Before that, my preference was NeXTStep.

    My iMac actually offers a nice comparison of Windows and OS X on the same hardware, via bootcamp. And that really makes you aware of how much Microsoft sucks.

    ReplyDelete

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