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

Not two days after I posted with my Apple MacBook problem the good people at apple have released a fix, Huzzah