Today I was let loose on my girlfriends MacBook. I’m a PC and don’t often get to play with her Mac, let alone do a Hard Drive upgrade. Nice, easy, Warranty Voiding procedure – I just followed the instructions here – http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2119528,00.asp

The hardware change was quite easy, and reinstalling OS X was also simple (if not time consuming). After a fresh install of the OS we used the Migration tool to import all of the settings/applications/files from her old drive. Just attached the drive using a USB kit – simples.

I’m impressed that my girlfriend trusted me with a screwdriver near her Mac.

After we confirmed everything transferred and worked correctly my girlfriend upgraded from Tiger to Snow Leopard. Another hour lost to installation but worked well, and everything appears to work.

My concerns were with her licensed products like Microsoft Office (Mac:Office), and Final Cut. Final Cut being the main cause for a HDD upgrade, as Live Type font sets taking up more than 10gb on her original 80gb drive (reported as 74gb)

Now she has plenty of free space, and seems happy with her new improved Mac – not forgetting to mention that both her MacBook and my Vaio laptop had memory upgrades (up to their maximum allowed 2gb RAM).

Looking forward to my HDD upgrade tomorrow (I’m surviving on 40gb split between Windows XP and Kubuntu 9.04).

Kubuntu 9.10 is arriving tomorrow also.