Adam and I have had our MacBook Pros for about 18 months. The plan was to refresh them after two years, but they way they're going I don't know if that'll be necessary. The processor is still fast enough and we upgraded them to 2GB of RAM a little while back so spec-wise the only thing lacking was storage - we had the standard 80GB disks still. This needed to change.

I had Digilife order in two 250GB disks last week and they arrived on Friday. I called this morning to arrange installation, but it was going to take too long to have the disk content copied across. Even though we're capable of installing the disks, and there's guides online, it voids the Apple warranty. With these being business machines that's definitely not something we want to do. Installation would take about 30 minutes for each disk while cloning the data was going to take a few hours. We couldn't afford to be without the machines for that long so we decided to get two external hard disk caddies and clone the data ourselves at a suitable time.

Well it turns out that OS X doesn't officially support booting from an external USB2 hard disk, and the two CoolerMaster XCRAFT-250 caddies I bought don't work at all under OS X. Yikes! I called Austin Computers in Cannington to confirm that they had an alternative brand of caddy available and drove from West Perth to collect them. I paid the invoice and went to dispatch, at which point they told me the didn't have any of the items in stock. I wanted someone to take some responsibility and was told "let's not play the blame game" by some pencil-neck geek. The guy that stuffed up my order was more appologetic and suggested a few other shops.

I want to go on record as saying:

Fuck You Austin Computers

Thankfully Storm Computers (who have a broken website at the moment) in Welshpool had two types of caddy so I bought one of each. They both appear to be working fine.

I used Time Machine to restore Adam's computer completely, and did a fresh Leopard installation on mine. I then used the Migration Assistant to copy over my old data. I enabled the Guest account and logged in as the Guest to allow me to overwrite the mlambie user.

Hopefully this extra disk space will mean that the MacBook Pros are useful, longer, and we'll squeeze even more value out of them... though the rumours are that Apple's announcing new MBP models in a few hours :)