Hi Sam fans,

You could buy a new laptop or save yourself £1300 and upgrade the one you have. £40 bought me a new 320GB hard drive, £60 bought me 4GB of RAM and £25 bought me a new operating system. Add a little patience and I have a brand new computer. This is how I did it.

Preparation time one hour. Cooking time 40 minutes.

There are 10 steps to upgrading your Mac, and none of them are very hard. However there are some things you will need before you start.

Ingredients:

If your are in America you should probably be able to pick up the screwdrivers at Home Depot. However if you are in the UK don’t bother with B&Q. Get yourself down to Halfords where they sell a nice set of 6 screwdrivers which includes both a Torx 6 and a Philips 00. If you are upgrading a Macbook you’ll need a Torx 8 which is also included in the Halfords set.

The Beginning

This is where I started with a 120GB, 2GB of RAM, OS 10.4 Macbook Pro. First things first make a complete backup of your entire hard drive first and save it to an external hard drive. As you are only replacing the hard drive, should you forget to copy any files, you’ll still be able to get the from your old hard drive. Nothing will be deleted, it’ll just be a phaff.

Step One

Remove the battery.

Step Two

Remove the RAM cover and remove the RAM. Later on when you come to closing up your Mac, just slot your new RAM back in instead.

I should have mentioned earlier that it is a good idea to get a little dish or cup to keep all the screws in. You don’t want to lose them.

Step Three

Remove all the screws along the back edge (where the hinge is), two by he RAM compartment and two on the inside top edge of the battery compartment.

Step Four

Remove the 8 screws down the left and right hand sides.

Step Five

This is the tricky bit. Now all the screws are out, flip the laptop back over and open it up. Starting at the back of the keyboard (near the hinge) very carefully prise the keyboard away from the chassis.

It is held in place at the front by four clips which can be difficult to get apart. oak the keyboard back and forth, taking your time until it comes free.

The keyboard is attached to the mother board by a ribbon. Be very careful not to pull the keyboard away too violently and break the ribbon. Bare with it and you’ll get there.

Step Six

Tip the keyboard back, towards the screen and gently unclip the ribbon and completely remove the keyboard. The ribbon will very easily clip back in later.

Step Seven

With the innards of your Mac now exposed, you can get to work on the hard drive.

This picture shows my original hard drive removed. The ribbon on the right is glued to the top of the hard drive (see the glue on the top of the hard drive?). Very gently pull the ribbon off. The glue is quite soft, but it can be a little tricky to pull it off without bending it or folding it over. Take your time or you’ll roger your Bluetooth.

Step Eight

With the ribbon unstuck, undo the bar that holds the hard drive in place, unplug it and take out the holding screws in the side of the existing hard drive and screw them into the new hard drive and then plug it back in and slip it into the hard drive bay.

Step Nine

Your nearly done. Just repeat these steps in reverse and close your back up. When you get to the RAM, just slot in your new RAM, screw on the cover and slip in the battery. So has it worked?

Step Ten

Your Macbook is now back to step one, it is completely blank. Switch you Mac on and it will start up with the usual bong and display a question mark in a folder. This is fine, it just means it doesn’t recognise your new blank hard drive. Switch it off again and boot up with your OS X disk i.e. hold down the ‘c’ button as soon as you put in the disk and hold it until you see the ‘Welcome to OS X’ message. This can take a few minutes so don’t worry.

The End

I did a clean install of Snow Leopard 10.6 (You don’t have to have Leopard 10.5 to upgrade to 10.6), but you can use whatever version of OS you have.

You can’t run though the installer just yet however. First click on ‘Utilities’ in the menu and run ‘Disk Utility’ This will reformat your hard drive in the Mac Extended Format (HFS+) format.

Now you can just follow the steps of the installer (give yourself at least 40 minutes) and that’s it. Your done.

Hi Sam fans,

So, FYI – Man should be brave.

Just in case it had slipped your mind, French Connection is on hand to remind you.

However there are two sorts of bravery. The first runs along the lines of possessing or exhibiting courageous endurance. Soldiers in Afghanistan would be a good example, but anyone standing up to an oppressor at considerable personal risk would count.

And then there is the second form of bravery advanced by French Connection. This is much harder to achieve because it requires you to make yourself look like a complete twonk.

In fact, you have to make yourself look like such a complete twonk that there is a danger that your bravery could just be confused for you actually being a complete twonk. How brave is that.

Fortunately, as anyone who shops at French Connection will tell you, you don’t have to get sand in your hair to show that you are a real man. Just slip on some bunny ears.

Hi Sam fans,

The soundtrack to your weekend has arrived. Featuring 60 of your favourite songs from TopShop, here is the Ministry of Sound’s Funky House.

‘Show me love’, ‘Love on my mind’, ‘Make luv’, and the aptly titled ‘Love has gone’, bring back all those special moments lingering around the earrings, endlessly waiting.

Turn it up loud, open your wardrobe doors, stare blankly at your girlfriends clothes and relive your banging Saturday in H&M.

Hi Vedanta,

You are a right bunch of little fuckers.

If you aren’t aware of Verdanta, they are a UK mining company that have ruined the lives 0f villagers in Orissa, India where they have a massive mine and metal refinery. When Verdanta first set up shop, the locals were told practically nothing about it. Today they breathe polluted air and are afraid to drink from or bathe in their local river.

To top it off, Vedanta now wants to open a new mine which could destroy the entire way of life of the nearby Dongria Kondh community.

Amnesty International has a new campaign to try and stop these greedy bastards. http://bit.ly/d473tE

Hi Sam fans,

I’ve flat lined. No one, not even me, has looked at this blog in the last month!

Obviously, something must have been wrong. Where did my regular two million uniques go? Down the black hole of my broken analytics plugin, that’s where.

Happy 25th.

Hi Sam fans,

Why don’t the BBC Trust want to ask us what we think about BBC3? Maybe it’s because it’s so good they don’t want to know what we think. Maybe it’s because it’s so bad they don’t want to know what we think. Or maybe it’s because people who watch BBC3 can’t write their own names, let alone go on the web and look at anything other than video clips of people hurting themselves or having sex with each other and fill in a questionnaire.

It’s pretty brilliant though isn’t it, I barely watch anything else except video clips of people hurting themselves and having sex with each other.

Hi Sam fans,

I’ve been taking a very relaxed attitude towards my blog, in part because I didn’t think that anybody but me read it. Even my better half can’t spare the time. There are always more important things to do, like watching Holby City. Well it turns out that one particular person does ready it, so this post it for you. I know you don’t live in New York, but if anybody reading this does, check out this film. I saw it in London and it is worth seeing for the SurvivaBall alone.

Hi Sam fans,

We’re back from our holiday in Italy and here are the pics. In 10 days we went to Rome, Florence and Venice.

Leg One: Rome 11 to 14 September 2009

Leg Two: Florence14 to 18 September 2009

Leg Three: Venice 18 to 21 September 2009

Hi Sam fans,

This morning I’m off to Edinburgh. Follow the banality via Tweets’n'Things twitter.com/tweetsnthings