MeNoTechie

Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard

neuromancer — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:20:03 +0000

Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard Unboxing

: Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard Unboxing: Close-Up

Just got my copy of Mac OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard, currently installing in my trusty old Mac Book Pro. Estimated time was around 45 minutes from install Mac OSX Installer. Should be a simple installation process. Will be upgrading my wife’s unibody 13.3″ Macbook pro tonight. What’s new in this release, check out the details at apple.com. Personally, i would like to feel the performance tweak on the stuff under the hood.

Update: Snow Leopard installed without a hitch (straight upgrade not from scratch). So far all my applications are running fine. Is it faster than before? Feels like it, but its too early to tell, need more real world use. Basically, this looks like the same old thing (which is not necessarily a bad thing) with changes underneath. Worth the price of admission, I like it.

Posted in Technology Tagged: OSX

Seagate BlackArmor 420 Unboxing

neuromancer — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:12:25 +0000

Posted in Technology Tagged: Home Theater, NAS

Apple Macbook Pro 15″ (mbp 4.1): my hard disk upgrade.

neuromancer — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 11:27:38 +0000

With the prices of hard disk storage going down, I decided to replace my 15″ Macbook Pro’s 250Gb HDD to 500GB. Unfortunatley no 2.5″ SATA drives were available on the market that time but I was bitten by the must-do bug. Went to DG Sharaf and bought a Seagate Freeagent Go 500GB 2.5″ portable hard drive which will be opened and the hard drive used for parts.

Taking apart the Seagate Freeagent Go is fairly easy, you do need to be carefull though if you want to preserve the visual asthetic of the enclosure. The top lid is held togther by some sort of double adhesive tape (no screws are involved), started at the back of the enclosure where the USB port is located and used a putty knife to create a small gap between the body and the top lid. Work your way around the edges and you should be able to remove the lid, there is a cable connecting to the LED (the throbbing light effect) to the enclosure electronics, just unplug the connector. To remove the hard drive, there are two gaps where you can insert a screwdriver and pull the hard drive completely from its plastic enclosure. Remove the rubber caps and unsscrew the drive its metallalic protector and you should be able to remove the 500GB Seagate Momentus 5400.

Replacing the hard drive on a MacBook Pro 4.1 requires taking apart the aluminum body. There are a lot of instructions and video on the web, I followed OWC’svideo instruction on how to disassemble and replace the internal hard disk drive. It took me roughly around 15 minutes to take the unit apart, plug in the hard drive, do a bit of testing to see if it boots (I did pre-install OSX on the new 500GB hard disk) and put it all back together.

Fortunately, the whole activity went smoothly without any incident.

30 days after installation, everything is all well and good. Until a 1TB 2.5″ SATA drive becomes locally available, I guess this will have to do.

Posted in Technology Tagged: Apple MacBook Pro

Mechander Robo DX Version

neuromancer — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 16:49:02 +0000

Ahh, Mechander Robo or Mekanda Robot as I have known it for long. Finally a modern toy on one 70′s the more brightly colored super robots. Mekanda’s appeal to me when I was as a child was it’s dual spiked shield which simply looked awesome, shark missiles firing out from it’s feet and of course the three mekanda ships (1,2,3 repsectively). Bummer of course would be the enemy omega missile which launches as soon as Mekanda activates. On with the toy, CM’S Corporation Mechander Robo DX version is a terrible dissapointment. The kit reeks of cheap hard plasticy material that, given a forceful nudge on the parts, would break apart the connectors. Care should be applied when putting the head in place, might break off the ears and helmet decor. Joint articulation is okay, Mechander standard poses can be replicated. The mechander ships, looks and feels cheap. Mechander-3 parts keep on breaking off. All in all, CM’S Mechander Robot feels like a knockoff , hope Bandai gives Mechander a Soul of Chogokin treatment sometime in the future (wishful thinking). Definitely not worth the price of admission, but Mechander is Mechander and as such I am satisified that I now have Mechander in my collection. CM’S is coming out with Balatak set, this time I am not setting my expectations so high.

Posted in Toys Tagged: mechander, mekanda, super robot

Blu-ray drive replacement for Dell XPS M1710

neuromancer — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 06:22:29 +0000

Got a relatively old but still relevant Dell XPS M1710 which I bought sometime around 2007. The specification of the machine is still respectable even by today’s standards: Intel Core 2 T7400 (2.16 Ghz), Nvidia GeForce Go 7900GS, upgraded memory to 4GB and replaced 160Gb HDD to 500GB running Windows Xp SP3. Only thing missing now to update this device for 2009 was a blu-ray optical drive . First thing I did was to download, install and run Cyberlink’s BD Advisor to determine if the XPS M1710 hardware components can suitably playback Blu-ray content. Results are all green for components with the exception of the graphics card (Nvidia GeForce 7900GS) which displayed yellow (upgrade required) and of course the current optical DVD drive a TSSTcorp DVD +/- RW TS-L632D. Purchased a NU EBC100 external super slim Blu-ray combo drive, which at the time of writing, was the only available slim Blu-ray drive in the Dubai market. Did try to buy online, but some of the blu-ray drive sellers were a bit on the shady side and the original Dell replacement drive was hard to come by. Removed the four screws of the NU EBC100 (underneath the anti slide rubber) to reveal a Matshita BD-CMB UJ-120 inside. Proceeded to remove the other holding screws to release the UJ-120 from the plastic (an a bit cheap feeling) enclosure.

With the XPS M1710 turned off, turn the unit on its back and remove the screw holding the current optical drive in place (you may need to give it a bit of a push to relase the unit). Slide the UJ-120 into the now emply optical bay and screw it in place. There is a slight recess when the blu-ray drive is installed as this is a bit shorter than the original drive, I choose to live with this. Booted the machine went into BIOS to determine is the Matshita BD-CMB UJ-120 was detected. Booted into Windows XP and the drive was detected and drivers were installed without any problems.

Next task would be to install blu-ray play-back software. The NU EBC100 comes with a Cyberlink BD solution disc (powerDVD, PowerProducers, Power2Go, Powerbackup and InstandBurn). Installed PowerDVD 7.3. Firing up the software required me to patch the it to the latest update for the 7.x software. Only to be plagued with unrecoverable errors when starting the application. Uninstalled and re-installed PowerDVD with the same results. Fortunatley, I have powerDVD 9 and blu-ray playback is functional.

On to some of my complaints. The UJ-120 take a bit of time to load a blu-ray movie. During my initial tests (used a region free blu-ray disc Ultraviolet and a region B disc The Day After Tomorrow), the disc detection was hit and miss. You can hear the drive trying very hard to load the disc and almosts hangs XP when you open an explorer window. Rebooted a couple of times with the same results, tried booting with the blu-ray disc inside the drive the the movie was finally detected. Obvisouly I don’t want to keep on rebooting my machine when I change blu-ray discs. But somehow the drive started to read the blu-ray discs after the first sucessful movie playback. At this point I will take this as it is.

When the disc loads, playback is seamless without any noticeable problems, however, the movie feels a bit washed out compared to blue-ray playback on my LG Flatron W3000H computer display and LCD TV. I guess, this is just me. Normal DVD, data discs and BD-R and BD-RE loads fine without any problems.

It is a bit too early to give out a verdict, the project for me was a roller-coaster of emotions from finding the blu-ray drive on the local market (elated), discovering the slight recess when docked (bit peeved), detection problems (bummed out), resolved issues (a sigh of relief). The end state of the Dell XPS M1710 with the newly installed blu-ray drive will be as a PC media player connected to my bedroom home theater setup, but that will be tacked in another post in the future.