Working computers are better than broken ones
Posted by Nick.
Follow up to my last post on my dying computer:
So, I replaced the old 80 GB hard drive (that prompted my previous post) in my G4 PowerBook, with a shiny new 120 GB Samsung from NewEgg. This new installation seems to have even made it run better/faster than ever! It has somehow proven to be much simpler and painless than I ever imagined. If it were a windows machine, I can only imagine the pain and suffering that would have taken place. Horray Apple! Commentary after the jump.
April 7th, 2007 at 10:33 pm Using
Thoughts: 1) The old hard drive had made more noise, more heat and was seemingly much slower than this new one. Huge bonus when replacement stuff is better than the previous part. 2) The 5400 RPM speed seems to be no problem and somehow is much quicker than the Apple one … not sure why… 3) Installation was a bit of a pain, and my older PB has taken enough of a beating that some of the things did not fit super easy, but if you have the proper tools, it’s a total snap (literally in some cases).
On restoring software and backed up data:
I had made a “bootable” disk image on an external USB drive shortly before the last drive finally kicked the bucket, in hopes to be able to boot from that drive and restore it to the new internal. This however seemed to be wishful thinking. Turns out G4s perfer firewire, and only certain brands of USB drives (must be a device software interface thing?). So, I was unable to boot from this external drive. Big problem right? Wrong! I just booted from the OS X installation DVD and ran disk utility to format the new drive and made “restoration” (which one can do with any old partition of whatever nature you chose) to the new internal (just copy the non-booting backup to the internal drive). Somehow OS X is smart enough that this was a total snap! In windows it would be confused by drive titles and locations and names and how software was installed on a certain drive letter! Just copy and shazam! It boots! So, a word to those trying to restore an old drive: it doesn’t matter if you actually can boot from your USB, it will still copy over and work.
So, finally, what I thought could have wound up being a new laptop and a few thousand dollars spent, was merely $85 for a drive, a couple hours of installation and file transfer, and the thing is good as new!
April 8th, 2007 at 7:41 pm Using
Nice work, dood. glad it worked out.
On that note, K is going to be acquiring a new (Apple) laptop this summer, so opinions are solicited. Macbook vs MB Pro? Large hard drive, small RAM and then install it ourselves, other ideas?
April 9th, 2007 at 11:28 am Using
There are a couple of things that could be going on to make everything extra-snappy. First of all, since your old drive was dying, that could have made it run slower. It could also just be the difference between a 3-year-old drive and a new one… faster reads are possible, denser packing of data, etc.
I’m guessing that the number one factor though is that there’s now plenty of room on your drive for swap space. I don’t know the exact numbers for MacOS, but linux likes to have at least 5% of a drive free for random bookkeeping information. I think I’ve heard numbers more like 10% for the Mac. Being able to cache things properly can make for a huge difference in speed.
I’m glad to hear that it worked cleanly. That’s a really good trick using the OS X DVD to do the data transfer.