MacBook Snow Leopard Upgrade and Duct Tape

Well, I originally planned to upgrade my MacBook to Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) over the holiday break which never happened. My MacBook running Tiger is so reliable that I just did not want to compromise it over the past few months. I finally got around to it yesterday and it was a complete success. In the process I also upgraded the hard drive to a 7200rpm 320GB Western Digital Scorpion drive and installed Snow Leopard on it.

I can now run Google Chrome on my MacBook and all the other newer releases of software that have a minimum requirement of Mac OS X 10.5 or higher. Nice.

The only issue I encountered during the upgrade was an issue with the white plastic tab attached to the hard drive caddy broke. I consider this a design problem and component failure (ha, ha!). Luckily I could still remove the hard drive using a small pair of pliers pulling on what was still connected and graspable of the white plastic tab. One other item where I was very fortunate in this activity was owning a precision tool set that contains the right sized six-sided bit (hexagon shape) so that was not an obstacle. If it wasn't for the precision tool set which I got for X-mas, this would have been a show stopper.

So how did I fix the white plastic tab you might wonder, duct tape! I never envisioned using duct tape to fix a Mac or any computer for that matter but once again, duct tape has proven to be the universal "MacGyver" fix it all component. Now that I have put the duct tape to good use, it even feels more solid than the plastic strip that Apple uses. Maybe the Apple engineers and designers need to take note here. Ha! I suspect the white plastic degraded and eventually broke due to the heat from the hard drive enclosure.

Anyway, I am just glad that I had not issues with hardware or software during this upgrade of my MacBook HD and OS. A first for me and I got it right on my first attempt overcoming all minor obstacles I encountered.