This week I let a friend of mine talk me into taking his Western Digital Scorpio drive from his laptop and swapping out my old 120 gb in my Macbook for the 250 gb one. My 13" black Macbook is now over 3 years old and still going strong, but the lack of space had been getting annoying as I was constantly having to offload precious files to various disks, flash drives, etc. My Western Digital Passport drive was kept strictly for performing Time Machine backups--and, boy, am I glad I did!

The swap itself was not hard at all. Using a whitepaper from Mac, the swap was incredibly simple. The only hangup I had was a star driver was required to remove the housing from the hard drive (thin metal casing with pull tab). So, if you're going to do this make sure you have a tiny one handy. It really is "plug and play", though, and nothing special needs to be done.

Next, came the fun part--the restore from Time Machine. All I had to was plug in my external backup drive via usb, boot up the laptop with the Snow Leopard CD, run the disk utility to format the hard drive (GUID format), then pick my language and restore! I highly advise reading this helpful article from Gizmodo on doing a Time Machine restore. There is something funky you need to do before restoring. Other than that, the restore took about an hour and a half, and I was up and running with a complete, seamless restore! Time machine worked flawlessly!

I was originally very upset at the thought of having to remove beloved baby pics from iPhoto, favorite vids and music from iTunes, etc. Now, this isn't nearly as much of a concern as I now have over 120 gigs of free space!

Overall, the whole process took about 2 hours from start to finish, with less than 5 minutes of that being to replace the hardware.

Once again, Mac did not let me down.

It's January of a new year, and that means Macworld 2008 is just getting underway.

Starting tomorrow at noon we'll get to see all the of Apple goodness Steve Jobs has for us. I'm very excited to see what's in store for this year. You can keep up with live blog coverage on Engadget.

Of course, there are a few quirky-looking things with this release, but just with the new features like Spaces, Time Machine, the new capabilities of iChat, and others, it will be worth its weight in gold. And, now that my Macbook is beefed up with a nice 2GB of RAM it should handle Leopard very nicely.

My Mac has become one of my most critical assets, and a powerful development tool with which I am running ColdFusion 8, MySQL administrator, Dreamweaver, and even Eclipse. With the new RAM boost it has absolutely no trouble running multiple simultaneous apps. Leopard should have a good 'ol time running on it.

Just 8 more days!!!!

A lot of people were disappointed with Steve Jobs' keynote speech yesterday at the WWDC. They were especially upset about two things 1) No real "new" news on Leopard and 2) Safari getting supported on the Windows platform. Personally, I don't have a problem with the latter--just makes sense on Apple's part. But, I do have to agree with the first one. Don't get me wrong, Leopard is going to have some killer features, but it seems as though Jobs should have brought out some big guns and really shown what the deal will be. Maybe he's holding out for a later time to let all the cats out of the bag. He only showed 10 of the 300 (yes, that's right, 300) new features which will be in Leopard. I'm sure there's a heck of a lot more no one outside of Apple has laid eyes on yet, and they're saving that for right before the big release in October. Personally, I love my Mac, I love OSX, and can't wait to see what the future holds for my Macbook. Long live Apple!

I have had my MacBook for several weeks now. It is running like a charm and has become an integral part of my workflow. However, I now find myself with a new dilemma--keeping data synced between systems. I still use my home PC for some things, but also use the laptop for many things. I'll often check email on one machine or the other--which causes me to lose track of where-I-stored-what-email-where... Throw another device into the mix--my Motorola Q (now set up with POP3 access)--and I've got emails scattered all over the place.

The same problem applies to my school projects/papers, or really any document for that matter. I have different versions of things floating around and am quickly losing track of where the latest versions are. This is becoming a really annoying problem. I'm at the point now where I feel I need to just scrap my home PC altogether and turn it into a server, but I like having to use Windows when I need to and having a little bit bigger screen than the laptop. I have Parallels on the Mac now, but unfortunately still don't have Vista installed.

Anyone else have this problem? How do you deal with it?

I decided to go with the Second Skin because from what I'd seen it looked pretty darn cool, and it is. Unfortunately, it's from Italy so kind of hard to get a hold of. I had a difficult time finding it online, but finally found it at Pictureline.com. They shipped it to me relatively fast and it didn't cost too terribly much. It was definitely worth $30 to protect a $1000+ laptop. I highly recommend it.

A lot of people have asked me lately why I bought a Macbook. Here are my top 5 reasons:

1) Size - the Macbook weighs a mere five pounds - several less than any other notebook computer on the market today. It is light, durable, and easily fits in my school bag for those late-night college classes. I won't mind taking this laptop with me to conferences and blogging away on the CFUnited sessions, unlike the Dell Inspiron I had which weighed about ten pounds by itself. In a bag with accessories, it was a backbreaker!

2) Performance - I have what some call "Windows fatigue" meaning I am just sick and tired of a crappy OS. Up until XP, Windows was terrible. Period. XP was pretty stable but still really clunky, ugly, and user-unfriendly. Oh yeah--and it still crashed all the time for one reason or another. Mac OSX, while by no means is perfect, is far more superior. From what I hear of Vista, it is just as bad as all the other versions of Windows. So, why do so many people still use Windows if they don't have to??

3) Usability - OSX on the Intel Mac is lightning fast. Software installs are simple and quick. The interface is slick and intuitive. Wireless connectivity is a breeze. Now that I can install ColdFusion and MySQL on it, there is no reason for any other development environment (except maybe to test in IE).

4) Historical Relationship - I have used Macs for many years. In college, I used them extensively for design classes to create posters, flyers, logos, etc. I became proficient in Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark and Pagemaker exclusively on Mac. I only migrated to Windows when I had to start creating databases for Web development and business applications.

5) "Coolness Factor" - Let's face it, I'm not ashamed to whip out the black Macbook with the white light-up Apple logo on it for anyone. It's a real eye-catcher, and people are amazed at the out-of-the-box features like the built in isight camera. Everyone who sees it is like "Ok, I need to get me one of these..."

Ok, I am going to add a quick #6 - Parallels. Windows running on a virtual machine (at native speed, I might add). 'Nuff said.

OK--so I have one complaint so far about Mac stuff. The design of the products is so awesome, but don't always stay that way. The cords are cool--until you've wrapped them up a few times! My really nice-looking white power cord is all kinked up already, despite how careful I try to be when wrapping it around the power brick. Now, when I stretch the power cord across the room it looks like it just got out of bed!

This same thing happened to me with an iPod cable. Does anybody have any suggestions as to how to avoid kinking up your wires? This is really annoying me.

It has been exactly one week since I got the Macbook, and I have to say it is absolutely wonderful. OSX is awesome, and I love all the tricks the Aqua interface can do. Also, wireless connections are a breeze, unlike the 300-pound Dell Inspiron I was using from work, which could connect if more then 10 feet away... All in all, I am very happy. Still getting used to this keyboard, but nothing that can't be accustomed to. More to come soon.