Repairing Mac Book Pro

All posts tagged Repairing Mac Book Pro

Tuesday ~ April 12, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on April 12, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , .

Upde's Apple Shoot-005-Edit copy

Happy Tuesday!

Just a quick update to my last post about my attempt to replace the hard drive in my 2011 Mac Book Pro.  The new hard drive didn’t arrive (thank you FedEx) until around 10:30 a.m.  I had watched the video several times on how to make the conversion but I was still nervous.  I figured there were any number of ways for me to mess this up.

I was going to photograph the whole process but that idea got away from me when I got into the actual work.  So the first step was to hook the new drive up to a SSD dock that connects to your computer.  Then using the disk utility from Apple, erase the new hard drive and make it suitable for Mac OSX.  Then using a free app called SuperDuper, copy all the files from the old hard drive to the new one using the SSD dock.  On the video that process took 1 hour and 37 minutes.  Mine experience took 5 hours and 45 minutes.  Most of which I spent figuring it was at some point going to give me an error message saying the process had failed. 🙂

Then just before dinner the copy process was done.  It was then a matter of taking the bottom cover off the Mac Book and carefully removing the old hard drive and plugging in the new one.  That process took about 20 minutes.  Button it back up and then the moment of truth.  Turn it on.  It seemed to take a little longer than normal to boot up and I was anxiously waiting for the boot failure message.  But it did boot up and then it was like magic.

It is like a brand new computer.  There is no way to compare but it seems like it is actually faster than when it was new.  Everything works perfectly and programs that took minutes to load now load in a couple of seconds.  WOW!

Now I’m thinking of doing the same thing to my iMac.  It’s pretty slow as well.  Stay tuned.

Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your day and be careful.

Sunday ~ April 10, 2016

Posted by Dave Updegraff on April 10, 2016
Posted in: Daily Posts. Tagged: , , , , .

April-09-2016

Happy Sunday!

I haven’t been doing much photography the last few days as is evident by the lack of posts on this blog.  I intend to correct that moving forward.

Yesterday afternoon Jeanne and I went on a photo drive.  Visited a lot of our favorite places and there just wasn’t anything worthy of an image.  Friday evening I was standing on the back patio and saw a large flock of pelicans flying over.  I reasoned that they would be at the 16th Basin or at the River on Saturday.  We found three pelicans floating in the middle of the channel.  Much too far away for a photograph.

April-09-2016-A

My friend Andreas has been photographing and following an owl at the Mud Lake Park North of Dubuque.  She has hatched two owlets this year so we drove up to the Mud Lake area hoping to catch a glimpse of the owl and her offspring.  She was nowhere to be found and the young ones must have been hunkered down in the nest.  We watched for a long time but nothing.

We did find these Blue-Winged Teal swimming around.  So we watched them for a half hour or more.  Lots of fun watching any wildlife interacting with its environment.  You can click on the images and make them larger for better viewing.

April-09-2016-B

I have a project I’m going to try tomorrow.  I have a 2011 Mac Book Pro that I bought new.  It was blink fast speed when it was new and now is so slow I stopped using it.

I put a new battery in it and have had some other issues but it’s a great computer and I hate to get rid of it.  So while doing a Google® search on how to speed up a Mac Book Pro the central suggestion was to replace the original hard drive with a SSD hard drive.  There were several videos available to demonstrate the process so I’m going to try it tomorrow.  I’ll let you know how it goes.  🙂

That’s it for today.  Thanks for stopping by the blog.  Enjoy your day and be careful.