The lowest priced aluminum 13-inch MacBook shows the following configuration:

2.0GHz, Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB DDR3 Memory, 160GB hard drive, NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics, Standard keyboard, Aluminum unibody, $1,299.00 (without tax).

160GB hard drive space is not really a lot these days, even for notebooks. For what I use the laptop I definitely need more hard drive space. So I decided to upgrade the factory installed hard drive (Fujitsu) with a 320GB hard drive (Seagate).

So far I had great experiences with Seagate in regards of all my internal hard drive needs.

The factory built in hard drive is a Fujitsu MHZ2160BH (160GB/8MB Cache/5400rpm) and currently available for about $60 (without tax). I replaced it with a Seagate Momentus ST903203N3A1AS-RK (320GB/16MB Cache/7200rpm) which is currently available for about $130 (without tax). Besides having the double amount of memory I am hoping for a slight speed increase due to higher cache and rpm number. I am also hoping that this hard drive will not be much louder than the factory built in one and doesn't have too much effect on the battery consumption.

Focus:

- Clone content of original hard (Fujitsu) drive to new hard drive (Seagate).
- Replace Fujitsu with Seagate
- Create a backup strategy for the new upgraded hard drive.

First I attached the Seagate to an available USB port of the MacBook through a SATA dock. I then initialized the hard drive and used the application "Super Duper" to clone the Fujitsu hard drive to the new Seagate hard drive. For some reason I can, for the life of me, never remember the application name "Super Duper". I guess it is because the wording "Super Duper" does not contain any hint that would indicate the functionality of the application.
This process took a view hours. After all has been cloned and the new hard drive has been set bootable by "Super Duper" I went ahead and replaced the Fujitsi with the Seagate.
I booted up the computer and all worked well. I adopted the same backup strategy for my MacBook that I use for my Mac Pro. "Super Duper" is my preferred choice for my backups. I actually bought 2 x 320GB Seagate hard drives. One to upgrade/replace the smaller Fujitsu and the other one to backup the new Seagate I replaced the Fujitsu with. To this day I do not use Time Machine for any of my backup needs.

Working with the new 13" aluminum MacBook on a daily basis turned out to be one awesome addition to my office Mac Pro. It is small enough to carry around virtually anywhere and it surprisingly is powerful enough to do my daily work on it on the go or away from the office.

Working on it on a daily basis there were two things that really started to annoy me. It has two dim options activated by default. I decided to turn both of them off. Looking through the internet it seems I am not alone. I decided to put this in the tutorial section of this blog to visually show how to do it.

Both dim settings can be accessed through the System Preferences:



The first one is easy to find. It is accessible though the Energy Saver icon of the System Preferences. It particlarly annoyed me when I was reading something on the computer, like an e-book, or looking at the art work I am working on. After 3 minutes on battery the display dimmed significantly. I understand this is a energy saving setting but in my case I like to decide when I want to dim the screen especially when I am working. That is why we have the nifty F1 and F2 keys to adjust the brightness.



The default setting is shown above, it is set to 3 minutes. Just adjust the 'Display Sleep' setting accordingly. I pulled it all the way to the right where it shows the 'never' setting. First dim problem solved!

For me the second dim option was not as easy to find. Since the built in iSight is functioning as a sensor to adjust the dim of the screen I looked for anything iSight. I was on the completely wrong track and finally found it though the 'Displays' icon of the System Preferences. It particularly annoyed me when I had a light source behind me and moved my head. Almost every time I moved my head the screen dim adjusted. On the other side I have to say I am always impressed by the way Apple invents new things to improve the overall user experience. For me I rather have it turned off.



Above you can see a screenshot of the factory settings. To turn the ambient light function off just uncheck the 'Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes' option.