Two Second Memory

Sorry for the long delay since my last post, but I’ve been in the UK for a while and didn’t have much of a chance to post while I was there. I will write a couple of posts about the trip because I had a really good time. So without further ado, Mac Power hard disc change.

Kathryn’s machine is a 12″ PowerBook running Ubuntu Dapper Drake. Before that it was running Breezy so I did an ‘apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade’ as I would normally do to upgrade to Dapper. It was not a particularly happy experience and the results left something to be desired so I cunningly thought that I would install Edgy Eft from scratch. I also have an unused 40G laptop hard disc which I thought I could quickly try out the new install just in case it went all pear shaped — just as well I did but that’s a subject of another post.

Anyway back to changing the hard disc on a 12″ PowerBook. Let me tell you this is not for the faint of heart. I did a quick search to see how I might go about doing changing the hard disc and when I read “remove the F1, F2, F11 & F12 keys” I thought WTF and decided to install into the existing partitions. Then I thought about it some more and decided to be completely safe so I found some really good instructions (opens in new window). So I followed the instructions step by step. By the time I’d finished I’d removed the keyboard — in its entirety, four keys from said keyboard (as mentioned above), two strips of sticky aluminium foil (I assume used for screening), two allen keys and, wait for it, 30 screws. No you didn’t misread it I did say THIRTY screws and what’s more they’ve all got horrid little heads! All to get the hard disc out. Now I feel that I should put this into perspective; my trusty old ASUS L3800 requires the removal of four screws. That’s it. The keyboard does not need to be removed, I don’t have to prise keys off the keyboard. It takes about 5 minutes to get the old one out and the new one in.

Now I’m an engineer and engineers seem to look at things slightly differently from most. That’s not an elitist viewpoint, we just look at things differently. From an engineers aspect that PowerBook is nothing more than a complete fuckup. It might look pretty and be fairly robust but to change something like the hard disc is nothing more than an unmitigated disaster. If I was designing a Fomula One car and it took 30 screws to get the wheel off I’d be sacked. Yes that may be a fairly extreme analogy: Kathryn’s Mac is hardly an F1 car, but there is a happy medium. It’s not like the hard disc is like the North Bridge chip which lets face it doesn’t get changed very often. It’s the hard disc, something that people might change relatively often.

Why oh why Apple made it so hard to do such a normally simple thing I can only speculate. Go ahead Apple make all this funky hardware but think of the poor sod who has to rip it all apart and put it back together when they want to change the hard disc.

Filed by rgh at 15:15 under Rant
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