I love my MacBook. In all reality, it’s still @justinshattuck’s MacBook, but I’ve actually had it for over a year.

He’s a great guy to give his buddy one of his MacBook’s that he wasn’t using…especially since at that time I wasn’t a Mac enthusiast. That all changed last February when I got a call from @justinshattuck that he wanted me to come over and look at some stuff we were going to be starting to work on. During the course of this conversation, I was offered this glorious piece of hardware and absolutely fell in love with it.

Now I understand what Mac enthusiasts have claimed all along…there’s just nothing that compares to using a Mac. It’s sleek, its sexy, it works (almost ALL of the time) without reboots, memory leaks, etc… It just works!

I will admit it was hard making the switch after being a career-long PC user, but after about a week or two…there was no turning back.

Upgrades

After just a few months, I ran into a problem with the MacBook. It had a small hard drive. It was only 60GB, and that’s not near enough for a digital packrat like myself. After suffering long months, and constantly moving things back-and-forth to make enough space to do whatever it was I needed space to do…I finally sprung for a new hard drive. Luckily, these are easy to swap out.

I’ve got instructions & pictures of how to swap out a MacBook hard drive after the jump.

To swap out a hard drive, it really doesn’t take much time or effort. Just some finger crossing and relying hard on your previous backups. The route I chose isn’t the only way to restore data, but it worked out beautifully for me.

Here are some thing’s you’ll need:

• Coin
• Phillips screwdriver (#1) if possible
• Torx (T-8) driver
• Patience

Here we go…

1. Shut it down and wait for a little while for the internal components to cool down…
2. Unplug everything…
3. Flip it over and use the coin to release the battery
   
4. Once the battery is removed, touch a piece of metal inside the case to discharge any static electricity.
5. Remove the three screws
   
6. Pop that “L” bracket out. Your hard drive is on the left-hand side.
7. Slide the old hard drive out using the nifty tab.
   
8. Remove the little case that surrounds the hard drive using your Torx T-8…and add it the same way to your new drive.
9. Now, just the reverse of the above directions…
10. Put the new drive in and tuck its tab underneath it.
11. Replace the “L” bracket
    
12. Put the battery back in & boot up with the OSX install DVD.
13. Got to Utilities > Disk Utility and format the new drive to the appropriate specifications you want.
14. Restore your old data whatever way you choose…

There you go…you’ve now replaced your old hard drive with a new one. I went from a 60GB to a 500GB.

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