I did some Googling and found very few alternatives – some looked flimsy, some were bulky, some were plain ugly and they were all way too expensive for what they are – molded plastic nubs.
 

What to do…

As you can see here, the MacBook Pro has less than half a millimeter of airspace underneath. It’s part of Apple’s super sleek design, but it naturally restricts significant air flow.

I’ve used two 3M “Self Stick Rubber Pads” under the laptop and right next to the paper-thin feet Apple supplied.

Here you can see the MacBook Pro with the 3M rubber pads – the back is raised by about 1/4″. The pads hold up under moderate heat. Super warm laptops may eventually turn the 3M glue a little gooey. It takes a bit of heat, though. The 3M rubber pads cost $2.50 for 12 – enough for 6 laptops or 6 applications.


 

The solution I went with…

The MacBook Pro is lifted by roughly 1/2″, providing extra air flow. The 3M mini hook is strong, gives a very comfortable angle of lift for ergonomic typing, etc. The 3M mini hooks are $3.50 for a set of 6, enough for 3 laptops or 3 applications.

Here are the two 3M packages. I got mine at The Container Store, but they’re available in lots of stores. And not to be too obvious, but #1 is the 3M rubber feet ($2.50) and #2 is the 3M mini hooks ($3.50).

 

I recloned my hard drive and prepared to wipe everything and install a fresh copy of Snow Leopard. Literally on the verge of rebooting for the clean-sweep, I opened Disk Utility and ran the “Repair Disk Permissions” and “Verify Disk” functions.

Lo and behold, the zip archives are now opening with Snow Leopard’s built-in Archive Utility (which no longer freezes up). I re-installed Unarchiver and reset it as the default unzip app. All’s well, and I saved myself an evening of reinstalling all my apps. Phew!

If anyone else out there Googles “Snow Leopard won’t unzip” or “Archive Utility.app not working”, I hope they land here for the quick and easy fix.

At the tick of 5:44pm, I rebooted my MacBook Pro 1) with the USB memory key attached and 2) while holding the alt/option key down to select a boot drive. I selected the OS X installation partition and opted for the “erase and install” option.

The installation was complete and the system rebooted at 5:53pm. I got through the final setup screens and had the new OS X desktop under my control at 5:54pm. Total time: 10 minutes!

Why was this clean installation so fast? The USB flash memory to SSD flash memory data transfer is much faster than DVD to SSD, and dramatically faster than DVD to spinning HDD.

As a side note, when installing OS X from a flash drive, you don’t have to wait for the standard integrity check of the installation DVD – the verification effort is automatically skipped. I’ve always ditched that step anyway, but for those who allow verification to continue, a good deal of valuable time can be lost. Just another benefit of going all-flash.

There were two things that really sold me on the Corsair P128: the 220MB/s read and 200MB/s write speeds and the 128MB cache. The read/write speeds are near top of the line for SSDs. The Corsair’s 128MB cache is simply staggering compared to the average 8MB or 16MB cache on standard laptop hard drives (16MB cache for the 500GB Seagate).

The P128 is the exact length, height and width as the 500GB Seagate. The P128, however, is much, much lighter.

Here are some simple before and afters:

Here’s the P128 getting mounted in the drive bay:

Dropping from 500GB storage was a bit of a mental hurdle, but I really value speed over size. That’s what external drives are for.

After a few days using the P128, I’m very satisfied. The price still makes me wince, though. Ouch.

Using Carbon Copy Cloner, it took roughly 3 1/2 hours to clone the contents of my 320GB drive to the 500GB. 120GB of photos was the #1 slow down, and #2 was the 320GB drive dragging its proverbial feet. Once the cloning was done, replacing the 320 with the 500 took about 2 minutes – 5 little screws (1 brace and 4 stabilizers on the drive).

The first thing I noticed was that the 500GB Seagate drive boots about 40% faster than the 320GB Hitachi. Apps open up a little faster – not 40% faster, but certainly 20% or so.

Once I’d booted up, I ran several tests and scans on the drive to make sure the drive was going to be stable and error free. Nothing sucks quite so much as banking on a new hard drive, only to have it melt down. Tests showed no drive flaws.

I then ran an XBench test to compare the two drives. The 500GB drive scored well over twice as fast as the 320GB with sequential and random reads/writes. For the non-techies, this simply means that this new Seagate drive whips the snot out of the Hitachi drive.

(XBench is a free utility that every Mac user should have, even if it’s rarely used.)

On the down side, the Seagate drive is just as loud as the 320GB Hitachi. That was a little disappointment to me. That said, the drive isn’t “noisy” per se, it’s just that the spinning is clearly audible in a near silent room or if one listens within 6 or 7 inches of the laptop body. No huge deal.

Other positives? XP boots and runs faster in Parallels. So does Windows 7. So does Linux. Photoshop CS4 opens up 25% faster and runs actions in an instant. File transfers to other 7200RPM drives are way faster. In short, pretty much everything is better and faster.

The best part of all? After Leopard, tons of apps, tens of thousands of photos, etc. I’ve got about 300GB free. Awesome!!

If you’re considering buying the Seagate 500GB drive, I hope these comments help. And hopefully you wind up with a good stable drive that passes any tests you subject it to.

Over the last few years, Apple has been reducing the size of it’s product packaging. Some packaging has been reduced by well over 50% – iPod/iPhone cases, MacBook and MacBook Pro boxes, etc. Software packaging (like that for OS X Leopard, iLife, iWork, etc.) has been dropped by about 75% in size, which is really great for the environment (and for Apple’s profit margin – win win).

After getting a new MacBook Pro, I was looking at the installation DVDs for OSX and iLife. They’re still DVDs – ostensibly an aging medium, especially with USB sticks and other flash memory becoming so widely available and inexpensive.

I think it’d make sense for Apple to ditch future OS X installation DVDs in favor of a locked USB installation device (or even SDHC card with a USB reader). Every Intel-based Apple computer, whether an iMac, MacBook, MacBook Pro or Mac Pro, comes with USB ports and can boot directly from those USB ports. USB data transfer speeds are much better than DVD transfer, so theoretically, OS X installation or repair could be greatly improved via USB.

Price is one thing to consider. I know USB flash memory is higher priced than DVD disks, but in bulk, USB drives can’t be too expensive. Besides, Apple would be able to drop packaging sizes by at least another 50-75%, saving more money and earning an even better reputation.

I’ll bet even Greenpeace would give a thumbs-up. Maybe. Those guys are tough to please! (I remember when Greenpeace was warm & fuzzy, all about hippies saving the whales and seal cubs. Seems like such a long time ago.)
 

The problem? When the MBP is connected to an external display and then goes to sleep for x-period of time and then wakes, something tweaks and the video card gets the delirium tremens, causing the external display to get all confused and flashing with static. Here’s what it looks like:

(Audio has been removed from this clip.)

Fortunately, unplugging the external display from the DisplayPort adapter and then plugging it back in seems to remedy the spasm, but it requires manual intervention (which is very un-Apple). Some folks on the Apple forums report that a full reboot or PRAM reset give temporary relief from the static.

Update: Within minutes of making this post, Apple released a firmware update for the unibody MacBook Pro that’s targeted (in part) at fixing this issue.
 

Update part deux: The firmware update fixed the video static. Thanks Apple!
 

Crucial and newegg to the rescue! I ordered a pair of DDR3 1067Mhz RAM chips for $125. That’s pretty affordable!

Here are a few shots to illustrate how easy it is to upgrade the RAM (and, coincidentally, the hard drive) in the new MacBook Pro and MacBook. Thankfully, upgrading RAM and hard drives on the new unibody MacBook Pro is easy and won’t void or risk the warranty. (Just don’t sneeze or drool onto the logic board when doing work and you should be fine.)

 
First, remove the battery plate and battery. This exposes the hard drive for easy replacement if you ever want to upgrade to a 320GB 7200RPM drive or even one of the new 500GB 5400RPM drives. (I wonder if the MacBook Pro could be run off an external 10,000RPM SATA drive like the VelociRaptor. That’d be awesome!)

Removing the battery plate does not expose the memory bay like in the earlier MacBook Pros, so there’s more work to do.

There are 8 screws to remove from the bottom plate of the MacBook Pro. You’ll need a simple jeweler’s screwdriver. Remember the order of screws as there are three different sizes.

Here you can see the inside of the MacBook Pro exposed. It’s gorgeous. I was pretty impressed with the exterior design of the MacBook Pro, but this shows it’s true inner beauty.

This is where the RAM chips go. There are little tabs on each side of the chips. Pulling those tabs apart by less than a millimeter will “eject” the RAM for removal.

You put the new RAM in and take the old RAM out. You do the hokey pokey and turn yourself about. (Gag, I know.)

Here you see the new RAM installed. Check out the logic board and fans. Everything is so compact, tight and compartmentalized.

Another inside shot.

Put the botom plate back on and put the screws back in. Tighten well, but not too much. You don’t want to strip the threads.

That’s it! It took less than 5 minutes for the whole operation. With 4GB RAM, boot time is marginally better, but the real benefit comes with running larger apps like Photoshop, Parallels, Final Cut, etc. I can have much more going at one time than I could before.

A side note: I also notice that the new MacBook Pro runs much cooler than the old versions. When running generic apps like Mail, Safari, Firefox, etc., the old MacBook Pro would usually keep at a warm 130°. When running Photoshop and/or Parallels for more than a few minutes on my previous MacBook Pro, the internal temp would rise to no less than 160° and would often top 185°. This new unibody MacBook Pro runs between 96° and 110° for normal apps and hasn’t risen above 130° even when running Final Cut. Very cool, indeed!
 

After experiencing months of crippling trouble with the video card in my 2.4GHz MacBook Pro laptop (resulting in multiple logic board replacements, LCD screen replacements, etc.), I was generously given a replacement laptop from Apple. Yes, a full replacement. Stunning level of customer service and tech support – clearly above and beyond the norm.

Here’s the new machine. So nice! This new design and the new specs are so far advanced that I look back to my “old” MacBook Pro with a sense of analog nostalgia.

P.S. By way of Google, I found this image of the new logic board for the latest MacBook Pro. Pretty crazy shape!

P.P.S. The only bummer about getting a replacement computer from Apple is that one’s Apple Care warranty doesn’t follow to the new machine. I’ll have to buy another extended warranty asap. It’s a minor factor, but still – darn.

Fast forward a year or so, and you’d see me sitting at my computer, cursing the task of converting AVI files to Apple TV friendly format so I could watch important videos on my TV instead of my little MacBook Pro screen. Curses, wasted CPU time and wasted disk space from double files… that was the price I had to pay for the pleasure of watching AVI video content. Sometimes I would spend as much time converting a video as I would spend watching it. Bah.

A few days ago, I stopped by Best Buy (I’m slightly embarrassed admitting that I went to that store) and found a very nice Pioneer DV-410V DVD player with a little USB input on the front of it. The DVD player handles DVDs and DivX videos among other formats. It also has an HDMI port for connecting video and audio to my HDTV in one tiny cable.

I set up the DVD player and popped in a micro USB flash drive loaded with a few of my favorite AVI videos and voila! it played the video cleaner and better than the Apple TV ever did! Imagine my surprise! A weight was lifted off my shoulders – the world seemed bright and warm. No more wasted time converting files. No need to stream video. No need to keep my MacBook Pro turned on while I watch videos. Sure, I lost the ability to rent movies from the iTunes store directly from the Apple TV, but I had only done that a couple times in 18 months, so it’s hardly a sacrifice.

Now I can quickly load a dozen or more AVI files on a stamp-sized USB drive and watch amazing quality videos. Buh-bye Apple TV – hello HDTV sneaker net!

Some people may argue that the DVD USB option is lower tech and doesn’t really constitute an “upgrade”. In my opinion, anything that produces remarkably better video, faster prep time, fewer steps, less hassle, consumes less electricity and allows more free time for enjoying video… well, that is truly an upgrade; the best kind of upgrade.

If you’ve never tried one of those DVD players with an internal USB reader, you absolutely MUST. It’s awesome.

P.S. As for the $90 in my pocket, I promptly sold the Apple TV and had $90 left over after the cost of the new DVD/USB player. Nice.

P.P.S. The aforementioned $90 lasted about 12 minutes as I bought another cool gadget that I absolutely had to have. C’est la vie.

The new MobileMe service doesn’t include Backup 3. Time Machine doesn’t read/open individual files. Google searches resulted in various complex ways to retrieve data from the backup.sparseimage files that Backup 3 produced. I called Apple support to get help figuring this out. After being put on hold a number of times and having to re-explain the situation again and again, my support rep put me on speaker phone with his supervisor. That supervisor suggested the simplest of simple solutions. Double click the backup.sparseimage file that Backup 3 had created.

Derr. Way too simple. Of course, the backup.sparseimage file just opened up like a DMG file would – as a separate volume (like a drive). I could browse all the folders and files that had been backed up in 2006, drag & drop to my desktop and another external drive as needed. Simple solution.

So, if you have an old .Mac Backup 3 archive that you want to grab data from, and if you are using OS X 10.5 Leopard, just open the old Backup 3 folders until you see “backup.sparseimage” and give it a quick double click. C’est tout. That’s it.

Granted, if your backup.sparseimage is corrupt, double clicking won’t help a whole lot. But for those ex-.Mac users who have stable backups, this is a nice revelation.

Here are some pics showing the process of taking the WD Passport Elite drive apart.

Here’s the prey in its natural habitat:

A credit card or thick fingernail is the best tool for prying the wide edge open. There are quite a few notches – very tough, very resistant to force. Careful, or *snap*, the case will break!

You can see the notches that hold the case together.

Because the case wants to snap back together, it’s necessary to hold it apart from all angles. I used four credit/gift cards to do the trick.

Here’s the center frame extruded from the outer case.

All the parts…

As you can see, the drive inside is a Western Digital 320GB SATA drive with a 5400RPM rotational speed. These drives sell for $130 to $170 online, and for much, much more in retail stores.

Here you can see the SATA drive separated from the tiny little SATA-USB controller. This controller works fine on its own. You can use it with or without the WD enclosure.

BONUS PICS:
I dropped the 320GB drive into my 2.16GHz MacBook Pro. It formats to 298.09GB. So far, I’ve got 219GB free. Wow.

Close-up inside the MacBook Pro…

Another close-up inside the MacBook Pro. I like the paper-thin SATA interface.

FINAL WORDS:
What I like about the Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB is that it’s a great hard drive for laptop use. It’s much cheaper than a generic OEM drive. The outer case is flat-out awesome – better than most 2.5″ cases you can buy online for $50 or more. An additional perk – the Western Digital My Passport Elite 320GB case is 100% bus-powered. No need for an external power supply or dual-USB cable setup to power the drive. I’m very happy with this purchase.

Caveat: moving from a 7200RPM drive to a 5400RPM drive can result in a slow-down here and there, but I’ve found that this 320GB drive is pretty swift on its feet so far. Boot time is only 3-4 seconds slower, Photoshop runs roughly the same and only video conversion seems significantly affected (by about 20%). All else is good.

This afternoon I opened my mailbox to find an envelope from Parallels. When I opened it, I found another surprise – a $10 iTunes gift card. That’s $20 in customer appreciation on a $79 purchase from 2007.

This seems rather unprecedented, doesn’t it? I like this trend!

Formatting the 32GB OCZ Flash Drive for booting into OS X. In this example, I split the drive into an OS X partition and a Windows-friendly data-swap partition.

 

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to copy a fresh image of OS X to the bootable partition on the 32GB drive.

 

The cloning took hours and hours. Painfully slow. This speed (or lack thereof) is consistent with the speeds I experienced with data transfers on my Windows servers.

 

Booting to an external drive is easy – just hold down the “option” key when starting your Intel-based Mac. When the available drives appear (internal, USB or FireWire), select the one you want to boot from and hit Enter.

 

It took over 5 minutes to boot OS X from the OCZ flash drive. Ouch! For sake of comparison, it takes about 25-30 seconds to boot from the internal SATA drive, and roughly 45 seconds to boot from a 5400 RPM SATA drive in an external USB enclosure like the Thermaltake BlacX. 5 minutes is rather crappy, but the cool thing is that it actually works.

 

As you can see in this image, the MacBook Pro is running OS X via the OCZ 32GB flash drive.

 

The 32GB drive certainly “works” as a bootable drive, but its performance leaves so very much to be desired. Five minutes for boot time is really unacceptable (6-7 times slower than external SATA drives), although I’ll admit that USB flash drives still have a lot of room for improvement.

Despite the aggravating 5 minute boot, it was fun to see OS X successfully boot. On a faster USB flash drive, I’m sure the boot time could easily be reduced by 50% or more.

I cloned my 160GB drive to the 200GB drive. Unfortunately, it took nearly 4 hours thanks to the 80GB of data running over a USB 2.0 connection. USB 2.0 sucks. Really.

Once the cloning was done, I got my handy-dandy Torx screwdriver set out and began disassembling the MacBook Pro. I used the awesome (but somewhat outdated) instructions from iFixit.com.

MacBook Pro, ready to go. Note the awesome Dr. Bodelin’s Laptop Bumpers that keep the MBP raised up a little for heat dissipation. I have a set for each of my laptops, my wife’s laptop, etc. You should, too.

Beginning surgery:

Removing screws from the body of the MacBook Pro is simple.

I found that placing the screws along side the iFixit instructions made things easier on me. So many screws, but so little to worry about.

Lifting the top off the MacBook Pro is easy… kind of. The rear, left and right pry loose with almost no effort, but the front was a real pain in the butt. There are some little plastic tabs that are hooked just under the lip of the front bezel. They just don’t want to let go. After a leap (or tug) of faith, I wrestled the entire top of the laptop off.

Pretty stuff under the hood:

Old drive with heat sensor:

Old drive and new:

200GB drive snugly in place in the MacBook Pro:

Putting the MacBook Pro back together was dirt simple. It took no more than 4 minutes and everything looks as good as it did before the whole upgrade process.

- – - – - -

The Good
After replacing the hard drive, I’ve got nearly 120GB free space. Wow. I noticed that moving data to and from my FireWire 800 backup drive is much, much faster. A 10GB transfer used to take 6-8 minutes, and now it rips through in less than 4 minutes. Parallels seems to open and run faster, too.

I’ve noticed almost no increase in heat with this new drive, and it’s actually quieter than the 160GB drive that came with the MacBook Pro. Hooray!

The Bad
With a 7,200RPM drive, I was expecting a serious decrease in boot time. I saw a significant increase – like 15-20 seconds slower. Converting AVI files to MP4 (for AppleTV) went from 5 mins 20 seconds to 6 mins 40 seconds. Time to open big RAW images in Photoshop remained the same. A bit of a disappointment.

The Ugly
During the cloning process, something must have gone awry, because the Leopard video drivers got seriously messed up. The colors on the MBP screen looked washed out and my 24″ LCD screen, which was previously gorgeous at 1920×1200, was now rendered dull brown-ish green in color and wouldn’t display anything above 1440×900. I re-installed the video card firmware update that Apple released in late February, but that didn’t fix it.

I ran a full battery of cleanups with Leopard’s Disk Utility and OnyX. Neither made any notable improvement.

After several fruitless calls to Apple Genius bars, I decided to wipe the drive clean and see how things would go. The fresh install of Leopard fixed the video problem, but it didn’t seem to make any difference with the speed I was hoping to see in the 7,200RPM drive.

Even with 4GB RAM and a fresh OS X installation, the apps I use most often seem to move at the same (or slower) pace with this new drive. Bogus.

Final Verdict
While I’m happy with the extra hard drive space, I am pretty disappointed with the fact that I’m not seeing any real-world, “holy crap!” increase in speed. Aside from the kick-ass transfer rates with my external backup drives, the 200GB 7,200RPM upgrade seems to have been a bit ho-hum.

Update on New Upgrade:

After using the 200GB 7,200RPM drive for a couple months, I swapped it out for a 320GB 5,400RPM drive made by Western Digital. Check out the installation process for photos, notes, etc. Comparing this modded 2.16GHz MacBook Pro to my newer 2.4GHz MBP, they’re really running about even.

These same display problems eventually plagued my 2.4GHz MBP and I had to have Apple replace the logic board. Thankfully, that fixed it – and it was free. – Jason

This creates a problem for me because I like to keep images sorted by date. And unfortunately, my file naming practices have changed over the years. I used to name files by event, like “Dallas BBQ – IMG 0001.JPG”. Useless for sorting by date. At one point, I added the date into the file name, but at the end. Also useless. Then I stopped renaming and left the file as named by the camera, like “IMG_7538.JPG”. That’s great, but when I upgrade cameras, the file names often start over at IMG_0001, and I certainly don’t want my new images to replace my existing files! Imagine 35,000 photos with inconsistent file names, then imagine them with incorrect file data. When the file info is screwy, the sorting and organizing becomes a hellish nightmare. Not even iPhoto can organize things properly.

Allow me to introduce the little application that saved my sanity – ExifRenamer. It’s a simple app – terribly simple – but it solved all my image renaming problems in a matter of seconds. ExifRenamer looks at the Exif data stored in your digital photos (date shot, for example) and renames the files based on that Exif data. In my case, I wanted ExifRenamer to add the exact shoot date as a file name prefix, then use the existing file name as a suffix. So “IMG_8399.JPG” instantly becomes “20071108 14-21-06 – IMG_8399.JPG” with down-to-the-second accuracy.

Check out this little video clip wherein I run some of my images through ExifRenamer. You’ll see how fast it works, but pay particular attention to the “Date Modified” column. Finder says these images were Created On and Modified On December 4, 2007. Bull-honkey. Check the proper output from ExifRenamer. 2003, 2004 and 200-frikin-5!

The best part about ExifRenamer… it’s free. Check versiontracker.com for the most up-to-date download.

In stark contrast, it’s a pleasure to see a company stand by its customers. It’s even more impressive and heartwarming when they voluntarily do something to show they appreciate your business. That’s what recently happened with Parallels.

I bought Parallels Desktop for Mac last year and have been using it daily. I long forgot about the $79 I paid for the program, partly due to the amount of time that had gone by, but mostly due to the program’s near flawless operation and the fact that it’s so incredibly useful. Why should I worry about a $79 purchase when it has probably saved me hundreds or thousands of dollars?

A few days ago, I was opening my mail and spotted an envelope from Parallels. I figured it might be a promotion for some new utility or maybe a notice of a future upgrade. It almost went in the trash. When I opened it, I was very surprised to see a $10 gift card; not just a “$10 discount on a future purchase”, but a $10 Visa card that I can use anywhere, for anything.

Wow! Now that’s how to show some customer appreciation!