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Mon, Jun 19, 2006

Use the Right Tool to Upgrade Your MacBook RAM

As others have mentioned, access to a MacBook's RAM modules is easy, as is getting the old modules out. But getting the new modules into place can be a pain really. You'll need *lots* of pressure. Do yourself a favour and do not use your fingers or thumbs to push the new modules into place. Use a suitable tool. I found an old knife with a flat end on the hilt that worked perfectly. And btw, in contrast to what the manual says there is no "click" when a module is seated correctly.

Otherwise this is a really cool machine. Did I mention that it's fast? The screen is brilliant, the keyboard is a good one (especially for Apple), and the MacBook makes barely any noise. It doesn't get too hot (at least no more than I expected, though I think it's a portable computer rather than a laptop), and the fan comes in from time to time only (and blows constantly in this case). Let's hope the book makes a similarly good impression when used on my business trips *knock on wood*

Oh, and Parallels Desktop is so cool (and fast)! I can dump my PC notebook finally :-)

Sun, Jan 29, 2006

Phantoms & Ghosts on my LCD

With recent events concerning the stability of my hardware I'm a little careful now whenever I see something strange or unusual... A few days ago I had a déjà vu on the LCD screen of my 20" iMac G5 (rev. B "ALS"). I looked at a browser window that displayed a dotted yellow line - and when I looked a little to the right, I saw a line of faint dots, too:

When I place a window with a dotted line like above on certain areas of the screen, these shadows or phantom images are absolutely reproducable. This seems to be a problem of the screen itself, not one of the graphics card or the video ram - because the phantom dots do not appear on screen shots (I had to take a photo to depict the shadow line).

Now, is this a common effect of LCDs? Or is this something to be afraid of, a first sign of a decaying screen? Well, we'll see, maybe time (or Google) will tell. But fortunately, this time I've got AppleCare.