MacBook Meccano

Posted on By Mark Wilson

Imagine that you are the parent of two small children and a beaker of milk gets spilt very close to (and splashes over) your shiny new MacBook.

After turning it upside down, shutting it down, removing the battery and wiping away all the obvious spillage you might want to check that there is no liquid inside the machine.

If you were to find yourself in this situation, you might find the ifixit do-it-yourself instructions for Mac and iPod repair very useful (or the Apple Service Source guide for the MacBook).

If you are lucky, it may turn out that the spillage hasn’t made it past the upper cover and into the internal workings of the machine. Phew!

Top quality service from Crucial memory – and a new Mac memory advisor tool

Posted on By Mark Wilson

I’ve written before aboutand, yet again, I have been blown away by the competitive prices and speed of service.

In the early hours of yesterday morning I ordered 4GB of RAM for my new MacBook. With free shipping, it came to a bargain price of £72.83 (Mac:Upgrades are currently selling the equivalent Kingston RAM for £83.82). The free shipping is for an estimated 3-5 day delivery but it arrived this morning – just over 24 hours after placing the order! A few minutes later I had the RAM installed in the MacBook.

Mac with 4GB RAM installed

Some people will say that you need to use OEM-specific RAM because it’s the best available. Nonsense. If third party memory was unreliable then major OEMs wouldn’t be prepared to sell it and Crucial is a division of Micron – one of the largest memory manufacturers in the world.

Most of my computers now have Crucial RAM inside and I’ve had no problems. There is only one notable exception – when I upgraded my Dell Server a few weeks back, the Dell memory was horrendously priced but they would also sell me the equivalent Kingston RAM if I wanted it. Some people have reported problems with value memory (e.g. Kingston ValueRAM) but this was the full-quality item. Ironically, I only bought from Dell to keep things simple – whilst I was waiting for the memory to be shipped the price for equivalent RAM at Crucial dropped to a lower level.

There’s one more thing I wanted to mention – Crucial now have a memory advisor tool for MacOS X. You could always browse by manufacturer to find memory for a Mac but this makes the process even simpler, querying the computer to see what model it is, how much RAM is already installed, and exactly which components to buy.

Apple Memory upgrades from Crucial