Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise
The Intel age has arrived here in the backwoods of New England.
My problems with my 12" PowerBook G4 have been documented (see Death of a PowerBook: Time to
Go Intel?) and, as a result, I ordered a used black 13.3" MacBook from Wegener Media. It arrived
before Christmas, but I was forbidden by Mrs. Claus to even look at my
new computer until Christmas morning.
My cool looking 13.3" black MacBook.
I spent Christmas doing the normal Christmas things and waited until
the next day to recover my data from my PowerBook and get it on the
MacBook. Normally, I would use my Time Machine, Apple's backup
application, to restore to the MacBook, but I had been in the process
of updating my contacts when the PowerBook crashed, so I wanted to
migrate the data from the PowerBook to my new MacBook.
Taking apart the PowerBook G4.
The PowerBook was dead, however, so I had to take apart the
PowerBook to remove the hard drive. Off comes the keyboard and the top
plate, and there is the hard drive.
Inside the PowerBook G4.
Fortunately, I have a hard drive enclosure and was able to place the
PowerBook drive in it. I then attached it to the MacBook and ran
Migration Assistant to transfer my preferences, files and applications
to the MacBook.
Two notebook drives and an enclosure.
I wasn't done, of course. I had to attach my Time Capsule drive and
back up the MacBook and update my PowerPC applications to Intel ones.
This will probably be an ongoing process as I go to use old
applications and discover they are PowerPC instead of Intel.
I like my new computer - it has a matte screen, replaceable battery,
replaceable hard drive, and easy to update memory. It can also run the
new OS X 10.7 Lion operating
system. I'm not ready to move to it yet, but it's nice to be able to.
I'm running OS X 10.6 Snow
Leopard and updating my apps to Intel in anticipation of getting
Lion down the road.
The big thing that I like about the MacBook is that it has a black
finish. Why? Because I like owning a computer that is different that
everyone else's- and there weren't that many black MacBooks.
Pismo PowerBook G3, 12" PowerBook G4, and 13.3" black MacBook.
Nothing is perfect. I need to upgrade the RAM, and I need to get
ready to make an upgrade from AppleWorks to Pages. That means that I
will have to convert all my old AppleWorks files from .cwk to .doc
files.
Progress is nice, but not always easy.
Still, the black MacBook is real cool looking.
