Systura Where information becomes knowledge...

This week, I completed upgrading my Macbook Pro with a new faster hard drive and more RAM.  I was utterly surprised with how simple the entire process was with my Mac - ok, taking apart the case - small screws which were glued in, big fingers, and the fear of scratching the case or stripping a screw made the process of opening my Mac interesting, but beyond that, the process was very easy. Open the case, pop in the new hard drive and memory and close the case.

After replacing the hard drive, I popped in my OS X CD and booted the system.  The initial menu told me that if I had a Time Machine backup, then I could choose the Time Machine restore from the menu, which I promptly did and ran into a few issues; one, I had to put the Mac on the network and I chose Wifi, bad choice, which I later corrected, two, the menu did not specify that I needed to partition the hard drive before doing a Time Machine restore.  It was a bit nerve racking when I got to the last step in the restore process and the restore program said there wasn't a device to restore to.  So, partition the hard drive and restart the Time Machine restore - it didn't even ask for my Time Machine password a second time.  Neither issue was a major issue, but when you boot off the CD, there is very little help to guide you.

As for the Wifi decision, I normally use Wifi and I had a Airport Extreme, so I figured it would be fast.  Wrong.  The restore tells you how long it will take and it was around 12 hours and not dropping.  I quickly dug up a cable and plugged my Mac into a 100 Mbps switch and disabled Wifi and the time dropped like a rock.  I was pleasantly surprised that disabling Wifi did not cause the restore to fail.

I think the entire restore took about 3 hours and all I had to do was reboot when it was done and login.  The computer was as if I was running off my old hard drive.  I love Time Machine.

Now that I have upgraded my Mac, I need to virtualize my work environment.