2011-07-31 (Sunday)

 Life  No Responses »
Jul 312011
 

SSD Experiments

A friend of mine at work recently purchased on of the new MacBook Air laptops. I was amazed at how fast the darn thing booted up and how applications opened almost instantly. I decided to order and SSD and install it as the main drive in my mid-2010 MacBook Pro.

I chose this drive from OWC. It arrived yesterday and I installed it last night.

Unfortunately, the Mac does not “recognize” the drive at all. Nothing shows up in Disk Utility so I am unable to format the drive and install anything onto it. I tried it in both the main drive bay and also in the optical drive bay. No difference.

Have emailed OWC tech support for further instructions.

14:00 – Update on this. I was pleasantly surprised to get a very quick response from OWC tech support (on Sunday even). A very nice fellow, Andy Loy, recommended that I try booting from the recovery partition on my old drive or, failing that, an OS X 10.6 installer and see if the SSD drive would be recognized. As it turns out that worked fine and I am now running of said SSD drive. Very fast!

Twitter Hacked

I got an email from the good folks at Twitter the other day saying that my account may have been compromised and that I should change my password. No worries – I did that.

I hadn’t checked my Twitter feed lately and when I did this morning I found some goofy post about not wanting to go to work tomorrow with a link to some SPAM site taking about making money working from home.

Fortunately Twitter allows you to delete tweets.

So consider this a Public Service Announcement – look at your Twitter feed every now and then and make sure everything this is something that you recognize.

MacBook Pro Surgery

 Life  No Responses »
Mar 112010
 

I’ve encountered unrecoverable hard drive errors on my MacBook Pro twice now in the last month. Both times I was lucky enough to have had up-to-date Time Machine backups.

To recover each time I had to wipe the drive and restore from Time Machine. On the way back to Humble yesterday from an interview, I stopped by Fry’s on I-45 (Houston) and picked up a Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM, 16MB cache, 320GB drive.

I swapped drives this morning and took pictures of the entire process. Continue reading »

MacBook Pro, D.O.A.

 Computers  No Responses »
Feb 222006
 

Received one of the first new Intel core-duo MacBook Pro laptops yesterday. With much excitement and anticipation, I unpacked the computer and plugged it in. Booted just fine. Problems during the initial registration and setup. The keyboard would not function properly. Could type lower-case letters and numbers. Could not type capital letters. Caps-lock does not work. (And no, the num-lock was not engaged). I plugged a regular Mac keyboard into the USB port and it worked fine. Called Apple tech support. Spoke first to Diane, who forwarded me to Wes, who forwarded me to Casey, who is going to replace the computer. Very sad. I have an issue number assigned to me… Hopefully the replacement will not take long.