Hardware reset

Living in a house means that the wireless connectivity can be rather temperamental at times. My four year old Billion 7300 coupled with a wireless Netgear router (WGT624 v2) suffered from regular dropouts and a wireless signal which couldn't quite reach my room 100% of the time. Updating the firmware only made things worse - resulting in me frequently storming downstairs to reset the router! I was ready to either (a) buy a new router or (b) buy a signal repeater/extender and hence more dollars spent! However, lo and behold, my sis pulls through and somehow scores a relatively new modem/router with Wireless-N capabilities (Netgear DGN2000)! After some quick setup.....Stability - tick. Range - tick (finally get a healthy signal in my room). Speed - tick, tick, tick! The broadband speed tests were improved and Wireless-N at 130Mbps vs a mere 54Mbps on the old technology. Woohoo!

So it has been a while since I got my Macbook. To be honest, I only use it to run a few spreadsheets, surf the web - nothing too strenuous. In between the first day of ownership and now, I have only had a HDD failure and that's it.

Recently, trying to download my photos from my new camera and manipulate a few photos had left me rather frustrated as it was S-L-O-W and clunky. Being a laptop, they are notorious for lack of upgradeability, but the two things which Apple seemed to have gotten right was the ability to add more RAM and add a new HDD which can be done by the owner. Checking the Apple store resulting in me navigating to page requesting some $300+ for 4GB. hmmm.

So I set myself off to find some aftermarket parts. Finding the parts wasn't too hard, as I just used staticice to find some RAM. I even ordered the goods online, so that was a real first for me! After adding some Corsair Value RAM to my Macbook, I have to say, it has run a bit faster and appears to be quite stable! I am suitably impressed...especially since the total cost was way less than half of what the Apple Store were hoping to charge!

100GB HDD just doesn't cut it these days, so that's next on the list of things to upgrade, so hopefully, I can get that up and running by next week. Looks like a 500GB drive is just the thing to fully pimp out my Macbook! Fully sic!