Stuff'n'Things

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.