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MacBook makeovers bring new life to a couple of old laptops
Last weekend provided not one, but two opportunities for me to do some upgrades to some "old" MacBooks to bring 'em up to workable condition. To start with, one client of mine wanted to get rid of an unused MacBook, so I decided to purchase it from her as a machine for training. The other client had one of the original 15" Intel Core Duo MacBook Pros and doesn't want to spend the money on a new machine. In both cases, the machines were running older versions of Mac OS X, had insufficient RAM, and had hard drives that were both slow and small. The following post is a textbook example of how you can bring new life to slightly old Macs by just spending enough money to upgrade the memory, OS, and hard disk drive. For the MacBook, I decided that I wanted to max out its RAM, add more hard drive space, and speed up the hard drive while I was at it. I wanted to set up the machine with Mac OS X 10.6 and a Boot Camp partition running Windows 7, with an alternative external boot drive containing Mac OS X Server 10.6. The machine's initial setup: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo (Penryn) CPU, 2 GB of RAM, and a 160GB 5400 RPM SATA hard disk. I chose to max out the RAM to a total of 6GB, purchase a 500GB 7200 RPM drive for the internal drive, and procure a USB 2.0 bus-powered external shell for the existing drive. This MacBook was also running Mac OS X 10.5.8, and I wanted to update it to the latest version of Snow Leopard. Click "Read More" to find out how the upgrades went.
Motorola boosts Milestone XT720 spec with 720MHz CPU and 512MB RAM
Some of you weren't too pleased to see Motorola's new Milestone hitting Europe with just 256MB of memory and a 550MHz processor, and it seems like Moto has listened. We're sure the XT720 would've done just fine running Android 2.1 with its previous spec, but we're hardly going to begrudge a free upgrade. The TI OMAP3440 is now running at 720MHz -- something Motorola had told us the phone was always capable of, though the company had initially opted to downclock away from it, presumably in an effort to extend battery life. RAM gets a healthy doubling to 512MB, bringing the Milestone XT720 more in line with its "premium multimedia" boast, while the launch date seems to remain unaltered: later this month for Europe and a big fat question mark for the USA. [Thanks, Thomas F]
Intel iMac: Easiest RAM install ever
So you purchased a new Intel-based iMac and now you want to upgrade its RAM? Well don't worry about it. According to Gear Live, it's easier than it has ever been on a Mac. The process amounts to no more than flipping the iMac over, opening a very small panel and inserting the chip. Now installing RAM on an eMac is pretty easy, but this looks even simpler. And to think of all the time I actually drew my own blood on a 7100.Thanks, Andru!
