MacBook Pro Model A1211

I’ve now upgraded three of these MacBook Pro model A1211 Apple Laptops with extra RAM and a faster hard drive.  I’m as pleased with the results as when I did the first upgrade!!  The performance gains have been astonishing. If you haven’t yet, read my article about the performance change before and after the upgrade in the Upgrade your Macbook Pro article.

The machine I’m writing this on was a real pig and always seemed even slower than same generation Macbooks (although I’m sure that had to be in my mind).  Now it’s snappy and responsive even running both Windows 7 in VMWare along with all the other stuff I’m doing.

This particular upgrade means going from 2 gb of RAM to 4 and swapping out the old Hitachi 160 gb 5400 rpm drive for a faster and larger Seagate 250 gb 7200 rpm drive.

The hardware upgrade is fairly easy on this model.  Just remove about 20 screws and the keyboard/trackpad assembly lifts up to expose the hard drive.  Disconnect a few cables, remove a few more screws and swap in the new HDD.  It’s of course the exact same size, just better.  Button everything back up.

One of the most recent ones need the OS installed on it from scratch so I just went about installing Snow Leopard on that one.  The second was a true upgrade and I needed to move all the data over to the new drive.  I have a USB HDD adapter that allows you to connect either a full size or laptop size HDD to the computer via a USB port.  Doing this allowed me to boot to the original HDD.  Once in the OS I used the Disk Utility to initialize and partition the new HDD.  Then I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy all the info onto the new drive.  Once it was complete (about one hour for 50 GB) I shutdown the Macbook, disconnected the USB HDD and booted normally into the OS.

Viola!  Full upgrade in about an hour and half.  The cost was about $150 per unit with shipping and all.  This is a small investment towards a computer that will last several more years!  My recommendation- upgrade your Macbook Pro.  Do it NOW!

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I’ve been looking for an alternative to Microsoft Publisher since the dawn of time…  Ok not quite but I’ve often thought that if an alternative existed the school could drop the $7000 per year cost of maintaining Microsoft Office.  The Macs could run Neo Office and the PCs could run OpenOffice.  Or both could run OpenOffice.

The two main advantages are cost and familiarity.  The cost is, of course, free.  Being that OpenOffice is cross platform is a big advantage because the interface is identical no matter if it’s Windows or Linux or Mac.  Currently we have Microsoft Office 2007 on the Windows computers and Microsoft Office 2008 on the Macs.  While MS claims them to be the same, they are not.  The interface is very different and MS doesn’t offer Publisher on the Mac side.

Scribus- alternative to MS Publisher?

The biggest holdup has been publisher because so many teachers use it to create newsletters to send home.  I’ve been waiting for a good alternative to present itself and while OpenOffice doesn’t yet have a clear cut choice it appears that another open source package, Scribus, might do the trick.  At least during my five minute trial and test of features it appears to work very much the same.  It doesn’t have some of the polish and word wrap appears to be funky but it does do many of the things the teachers want and think they need.

This discovery will weigh heavy on my mind as I try to investigate the possibility of eliminating MS Office from the school’s standard software and by doing so save over $6000 per year!

Popularity: 35% [?]

Today Shantelle played her last peewee basketball game. This could potentially be her last peewee game ever unless the school district decides to get rid of 6th grade sports next year. Unfortunately they lost to Granby but the coaches said they had a great season and everybody loved practice and the games. I’ll post some pics later.

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Shortly after we had a nice snow storm dropping 6-8 inches of snow the following two days were colder than -20 degrees F. I love it when it snows because it’s not nearly as cold. I’m tired of the bitter cold winters. Maybe it’s time to look into moving somewhere warmer- like Alaska.

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I was fixing pizza for supper tonight and since we have a large family I had to fix two, as I always do. Reading the back of the boxes I couldn’t find the directions for cooking two pizzas at once. Upon closer inspection I read, “for instructions on cooking two pizzas at once visit our website at digorno.com.”

Give me a break! Put the directions on the fricken box!

Popularity: 38% [?]

We just got home from watching the outstanding Harlem Ambassadors!  This is a basketball team that puts on a great show with a positive message.  They can be contacted for fund raisers.

Our team which consisted of about 20 locals ranging from pretty darn good basketball players to the oldest player, a semi-retired high school principal and coach at the young age of 68.  While the Ambassadors may not be quite good enough to make it in the NBA, they were certainly better than our Kremmling team and still beat us even after putting us ahead by 20 points at the half!

One thing nice is that they promote clean, good fun with a message of “stay in school and off of drugs.”  The center of the team is a powerful woman demonstrating racial and gender equality.  One thing these players have that not all NBA players do is a college degree.

Lots of fun and the kids enjoyed it.  We purchased some penants and they had them autographed by the players.

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Yesterday while at a local bookstore I found it refreshing to find 5 different magazines about Linux.  My excitement was quickly reduced to frustration in the crucible of my brain heated by anger when I noticed all but one were at least $15.00!  This is because they all contained CDs or DVDs with Linux installs on them.

Don’t get me wrong.  There was one that only cost $6.00 which is a price I would pay but the others had better articles for me.  The $6 mag was geared toward long time Li/Unix users.  They were talking about modifying scripts and developing applications and some other stuff way over my head.  It would be nice if these other magazine publishers would put out two versions- one with the media and one without.  Most people have a fast enough internet connection to not need the media.  Beside, the media isn’t worth $10 IMHO (in my humble opinion).  I would buy the media online before I would buy it in a magazine.

I would love to install and test the new OpenSUSE 11, Fedora 10 (after all Fedora 11 Alpha is out), the new KDE 4.2.1 XFCE and other stuff but since time is so limited I do occasionally rely on the opinions of others who have done what I could not.

So what happened was that I stood and read the magazines at the news stand and they missed out on a sale because the publication was too expensive.

Do you know of good publications?  If so drop us a line!

Popularity: 39% [?]

Here’s a song by Agonist called Business Suits and Combat Boots.  It’s killer…

I’m not sure of the statement they are trying to sell- perhaps they’re socialist anti-war vegetarians?  It’s hard to understand what they are screaming into the mic but the instruments are phenonominal!

Popularity: 9% [?]

The weather this winter has been extremly odd.  We have swung from temperatures in the arctic cold to VERY warm for this time of year.  At first I thought it might only be here in the north western part of Colorado, but upon further observation I realized that the same thing is happening in Denver and on the Front Range as well.

Temperatures for the past week have been in the low 70′s for Denver and surrounding areas and up as high as 76 in Pueblo.  While at the same time the temperatures here have been cold.  We have been getting down to an average of 17 below zero and up to as much as 9 degrees during the day.  This was happening at the same time that Denver and company were in the 70′s.  That seems odd to me.

Earlier this year we were unseasonably warm here while Denver had the Arctic blast with wind chills down to 30 below zero.  At this time we unseasonably warm getting into the low 50′s.  This is the first year I remember such an odd temperature difference between the two sides of the mountains and such extremes.

I am moved to write about this since yesterday the temperature was -19 when we left for school at 7:30 and this morning at 7:30 it’s raining at 32 degrees.  The weather patterns are certainly changing, there is no doubt about that.

Popularity: 8% [?]

We took a trip to Silverthorne to get some groceries today and it was 60 degrees in Frisco!  Currently at the time of this writing it’s 5:40 pm and 39 degrees.  The past few days have been very warm for this time of year and there is lots of snow melt already.  This is highly unusual and I’ve noticed that this year is quite a bit warmer overall than winters past.

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Popularity: 12% [?]

Now this certainly came as a big shock to me- the Broncos fired Mike Shanahan as the head coach.  Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that the Broncos failed to make it to the playoffs by blowing a three game divisional lead.

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Tonight family and friends came over for a Chrismas Eve meal and fellowship.  The kids played XBOX and tracked Santas’ progress with NORAD at  http://www.noradsanta.org/en/home.html.  The finally went to bed at 11:00 pm and Santa was at Easter Island Chili and turning around to head back north.  

We told the kids that they better get to bed before he gets here or he might not leave them anything.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Woo Hoo! The XBOX 360 just arrived at exactly Noon!  The kids were so excited they wanted to set it up right away but I told them to wait until tonight.

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There are several things we are hopeful that are “Almost Here” but none is more pressing in my kids minds than the XBOX 360 returning from Mesquite TX after being sent away for a little R & R (Repair & Reconditioning).

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I have created a Family Photo Album.  This will hold almost all the pictures.  I suggest you download the CoolIris plugin.  It’s very impressive…  and the best way to view large galleries of pictures.

Old Time

1 Photos

Shantelle

2 Photos

kids

13 Photos

Popularity: 12% [?]