Western Digital Scorpio Blue

April 7th, 2010 § 0

I just bought a WD Scorpio Blue for my MacBook because I was running out of space in my Windows 7 partition.

The HD is 320GB, double the size I had previously, and I am happy with it. You can barely hear it and the temperature is around the same as the Fujitsu that came with it but the speed is better or at least that’s what the Windows Experience Index says (5.5). Before changing my HD I had 4.9 because of my hard drive but now the lowest rating is my GPU with 5.3.

The price was $919.00 Mexican pesos plus shipping in PC en Línea and was delivered to my house 24 hours after I made the payment so it was definitely a great service.

My only problem installing the hard drive is that you need a T6 Torx Screwdriver in order to place it properly inside the MacBook. You can install it without one but the disk may move a little bit while you are in the move. You can find one of these screwdrivers in Home Depot or Sears.

Sleep not working on Windows 7 – MacBook

February 25th, 2010 § 0

While running Windows 7 on my MacBook I discovered that I forgot to disable the sleep mode when I’m not using my battery so after I came back later everything was turned off.

I could clearly see that it was in sleep mode because my MacBook has a small led that keeps blinking when it is sleeping in OSX or Windows. I tried pressing the keyboard to see if it turned on and it seemed to do so but the display was off in both the internal and external displays. I couldn’t bring it back.

I googled the problem and it was a known issue with the NVIDIA drivers included with Boot Camp so I downloaded the latest version from the NVIDIA site and the problem was solved.

Windows 7 x64 with Boot Camp

February 21st, 2010 § 0

Today I installed Windows 7 on a MacBook 13″ Aluminum in order to do .NET development with Visual Studio as my Virtual Machine was getting slow. The experience was painful, first because I had to free a lot of space from my hard drive and second because Boot Camp 3.x x64 is not officially supported in my Mac.

I wanted a Windows partition with a size around 50GB so I had to free some space on my hard drive. After I got 70GB free I decided to start the Boot Camp assistant and to my surprise I couldn’t make it complete the first time due to an error: “Files cannot be moved…”. The only solution recommended by Apple was to backup everything and reinstall OSX and I was not happy so I decided to google for an answer until I found two that worked:

  1. Free more space, I got 100GB free.
  2. Defragment the hard disk with iDefrag

I tried the first one and it didn’t work until I did a quick (online) defrag with iDefrag.

After doing both steps I was able to create the new partition and install Windows 7 x64 and when I tried to install the Boot Camp drivers and utilities in Windows 7 I got another error saying that my MacBook wasn’t supported with any 64bits version, WTF? I had to run the BootCamp64.msi manually as Administrator from my Snow Leopard DVD and in order to update it I had to first decompress the BootCamp 3.1 Update and do the same with it.

Now everything is running fine even though my MacBook is “unsupported”.

MacBook RAM

May 12th, 2009 § 0

I recently  bought memory for my MacBook from Crucial even though some reviews said that some third party memory modules didn’t work well with the Aluminum MacBook, including Crucial, but my experience is completely different.

First I want to say that the memory was cheap compared to the prices I received from some Apple resellers and also from other shops that sell RAM. I got a 4GB kit for $65 dollars vs. $150 dollars for each 2GB module at the local shops so for me it was a great deal. I had to pay $20 dollars for shipping and a few more for taxes to UPS for importing it but I also bought memory for other computers so it was a reasonable price.

My advice for Mexican buyers is to pay with Paypal as the order is processed immediately and the product is ready to be shipped the same day. I ordered on Thursday and my package was in my door on Monday.

So far so good the memory has been working great and my MacBook feels faster and more responsive. I really recommend Crucial if you plan to buy memory and it doesn’t matter if it is a Mac or a PC.

Where Am I?

You are currently browsing entries tagged with macbook at My Blog.