I had a rather disappointing experience recently with an Acer laptop that I’d like to make a note of. I think the crux of the issue is a difference between the latest driver available and the best driver for a machine. The details are that the laptop is an Acer Aspire V5-122P. It is a cheap and cheerful laptop that I purchased for the following reasons: Backup machine in case my daily driver broke down, Low powered machine to test performance of websites, Laptop I could take travelling without undue stress as to it’s wellbeing.

As a sort of follow up to the article here I decided to continue to attempt to scratch my Linux itch. Reasoning that maybe virtual machines aren’t a fair reflection of a system’s capabilities I went and bought a little netbook. I went for a little Acer Aspire in the January sales. This is a relatively cheap model, but it was the Christmas break so I had a little bit of time to kill.

Tutorials I recently updated my hard drive on my MacBook Pro to an SSD drive. I used the following tutorials to do the upgrade, which was pretty stratightforward: The second video is particularly interesting. You can purchase a cradle for another hard drive. This can be used either for you existing hard drive, or a second identical SSD that you can then put in RAID configuration. Parts I picked up the pieces from Amazon UK here: Optical Bay Caddy Samsung 840 Series SSD

We had a coffee spillage here, resulting in a sad macbook. Two little things to come out of it though: Taking hard drives out of mac books is actually relatively painless. It merely involves 3 screws, a likkle screwdriver and an L-plate behind the battery. A little external hard drive case (nicely provided by Darran) can save a lot of bother. Simply remove the hard drive, insert it into the case, plug into another computer and with any luck your hard drive is up and running