MacBook memory upgrade

My step-mother-in-law is over with her 512mb macbook, and a box from crucial with more DIMMs. Time for memory surgery. Since she gave me her old G4 TiBook in trade for the effort of doing a memory upgrade, I knew I had to do a good job. ;-)

The do-it-yourself instructions at the apple MacBook Support Site are quite good. However, they don't provide any info about how to troubleshoot it.

Turns out that if the memory isn't seated correctly, the macbook's sleep light will flash or blink - not the throbbing you see when it's asleep, but actually blinking. A blinking sleep light means that the memory isn't seated correctly, and you really need to ram the stuff in there. (ram the RAM? Pun wasn't intended at first, but hey, gotta go with what works for you.)

Ironically, I had been thinking that this was the first computer upgrade for which I wouldn't need my NeXT memory extraction tool, but turned out I was wrong - it was just the thing to push the memory down into the slots after it was past where my fingers could push it.

Many many thanks to Conradium's blog for info on this.

Amusing anecdote about macs in business

Arik Hesseldahl of Business Week writes about being at an analysts' meeting at Hewlett-Packard, and watching HP CEO Mark Hurd's reactions to the fact that a few of the PR people had brought mac book pros to the meeting. Since HP is in the business of selling laptops themselves, he had some thoughts about it.

Mac Book Pro firewire 800 performance

Nearly a year ago, I wrote up some stats about firewire 400 vs firewire 800 vs local disk on my 17" 1.33ghz Powerbook G4. I thought I ought to revisit those numbers with the 17" mac book pro (core duo, not core 2 duo). So, here they are:

Interface	17" MBP	17" PB G4
Local Disk	1:02.44	1:51.80
FW 800	00:34.27	00:32.12
FW 400	00:53.55	00:53.74

These are the times to create 4 512mb files; writing out a total of 2 gb of data. I timed all three interfaces on the MBP 4 times, and the above numbers are the averages.

The obvious thing that jumps out here is that the 7200 RPM drive option in the MBP is a good deal faster than the 4200 RPM drive that I had in the powerbook. The other numbers are pretty comparable. The FW 800 in the powerbook appears to have been a smidgin faster than the FW 800 in the mac book pro, but I wouldn't view that as being all that meaningful; probably within the reasonable noise in the experiment. I'm surprised that the FW 400 numbers are so close.

The target drive for both the FW 800 and FW 400 experiment is a La Cie Bigger Disk Extreme 1Tb. The drive is fuller than it was when I did the test on the powerbook g4, but given that the firewire 400 numbers are so close, I doubt that that had much of an effect.

Conclusions - FW-800 is clearly faster than FW-400, and the FW performance of the MBP is comparable to that of the 17" aluminum powerbook G4.

Useful little bit of info about multiple monitors under Mac OS/X

Did *you* know that Quicktime had its own monitors preference panel? I didn't.

Like the poster, I've got a Dell 2407FPW monitor jacked into my Mac Book Pro, and it's a sweet sweet thing.