setting up the new Mac

As I mentioned earlier, I bought a new MacBook. My old MacBook was the first-gen black one, and it was getting quite long in the tooth. Spurred on by a good deal at MicroCenter (thanks again to Peter Cohen for alerting to me it!), I got one of the new unibody MacBooks.

Since it’s just an off-the-shelf MacBook, there’s a couple of immediate upgrades to be done to it. It comes with 2-GB of RAM, which I’m upgrading to 4-GB. This time around, NewEgg seems to have the best price on RAM. I’m also going for a larger hard drive than the 250-GB one included, moving up to a 500-GB 7200rpm drive. It’s not quite as fast as a SSD, but SSDs are still a bit more than I want to pay to go into a MacBook.

After installing the hard drive and RAM (the guide at iFixit is quite useful), then it’s time to partition the hard drive and reinstall the OS. I always reinstall the OS on a new Mac so that I only get the stuff I need. Why install gigs of printer drivers when I don’t even own a printer?

I usually have one system partition and one data partition. I move my user folder to the data partition, and I keep as much stuff on that partition instead of the system partition as I can. That way, should something go belly-up on my system partition, I can (hopefully) still recover my data partition and not lose as much.

After the OS is reinstalled, then it’s time to install the apps that I use the most:

• Office 2008
• iLife ‘09
• Firefox (I prefer Safari, but there are sites that don’t play well with it)
• EverNote
• Tweetie (although I’ll give Twitterific a go again, since MacHeist gave me a free license)
• Quicken 2007 (I’m really not a big fan of Quicken, but I’m a very deep user of it (my entire financial life is in that data file), and none of the more Mac-friendly apps meet my needs yet)
• The Sims 3 (I hope it runs well on the MB!)

Now you know what I’m doing with my weekend! I’m sure I’m forgetting some of the apps that I’ll install over the weekend, this is just off the top of my head.