Hello from the Eldest Geek! SSD UPGRADES – Youtube and other issues!

SSD UPGRADE IN YOUR FUTURE? MAC? PC? iMac? BEWARE YOUTUBE!!!

I’ve been struck in having 3 customers very recently who all purchased SSD upgrade kits for their Imacs.

In each case it seemed to be a simple job and youtube showed how to do it.  All led to major problems if not disaster.
BEWARE YOUTUBE VIDEOS.  Its often – VERY OFTEN – much harder than they make it seem!  Take these with several teaspoons of salt!

A SSD upgrade is great.  I just gave myself a Christmas present of a 2 TB HHD for my 2011 Macbook pro.

And it loved it!

But the Imacs especially the new ones, and Mac Minis are awkward to work on – and therein lies the danger!

It is VERY easy to mess these up.  The Imacs take quite a bit of care to remove the screen (and the newer Thin iMacs have the screen secured by

gluetape).  And once you have the screen out there is VERY LITTLE PLAY in the various cables.  It is almost a two person job – one to hold the screen and another to remove and replace the cables on the screen for removal and reinstallation later.  In fact, we’ve done several as two person jobs just for some extra security and out of an abundance of caution!

Once the screen is off its easy to swap the drive.  But then reattaching the screen involves the same awkward – is the cable on right? – moment.

In one case the customers hand slipped – in another the cable was not – quite – inserted right.  Both cases led to logic board repair (and in one case a new screen).

This is NOT to make anyone feel bad (and you may well be on my list) – its NOT easy doing this.  And the big problem with many youtube clips is it looks like a slam dunk.

In general to do a SSD upgrade, you should ALWAYS backup the drive first.  With Time machine on macs.  And then we want to back it up – to the new SSD!

In windows – get a utility called Casper on the mac side get SuperDuper or CarbonCopy.  These utilties let you clone your drive to the new SSD before it’s replaced.  Make sure you have a USB-to-SATA arrangement – these are easy to get these days.  You attach the new drive to the sled or insert it in the USB Drive enclosure.
Clone the drive.

NOW you are ready as you have a bootable image of your existing drive on the new SSD!

Install the new SSD – and you are up and running (CAREFULLY get that screen back on for you iMac folks).

One extra step for Mac folks – SuperDuper does NOT recreate the Recovery HD Partition – to do that you need (after you are all done) to REINSTALL Mac OS – and THAT will create that partition (without causing any other problems).  Then make sure to apply all updates – then you are done!

Take care folks – SSD upgrades are great things and we will happily help you with this!

Call us with any questions 🙂

RUSSIAN HACKING ADDENDUM.

Now a ‘report’ has been issued and upon examining it I’m even LESS impressed that this was a Russian effort.  Simply put the malware used was an OLD version of a program that originated in the Ukraine.  Now – needless to say – the Russians have their own malware, and they are VERY good at this.  And even if they wanted to use someone elses they would at least have used the current version! (current version works better than the older version).
This makes even less sense now than it did before!

THOUGHTS ON CONVERTIBLES AND THE SURFACE

 

I’ve had in some rather nice convertible laptops – the ones that allow you to flip the screen back over and around and convert the laptop into a tablet. HP makes a cheap one (the X360) and Lenovo makes a nicer one (Yoga 2 and 3).  Both are really rather nice. Giving you the best of both worlds.

The HP is more an entry level one with a platter drive and a dual core pentium, while the Yoga is an i5 with a SSD drive!
Both of these devices are trying to fill in a niche that used to be a ‘netbook’ – and which have wiped out the netbook as an item.  Both of these are 11 inches and are mover than suitable as small laptops – but with much better features!  And the touchscreen does let you run Windows 10 on a tablet, the same as a Surface – but of course for much less money!

Coming to the Surface – My wife got one from work and she loves it  I’m pretty antagonistic to these right now because I recently has to work on one and that was a NIGHTMARE.  Cracked screen needed to be replaced.  And we did.  But then the screen would NOT light up.  Well, had we been Best Buy we would have handed it back and said ‘have a nice day’.  But I NEVER let the customer be on the hook if something unfortunate happened during our working on it.  So I got another logic board for it and replaced that – INTENSIVE job – some 60 screws that had to be removed, and very delicate work on cables and the like.  But new board and new screen – and — wait for it — it STILL would not turn on the screen!
WTF you say?  (or at least I did LOL).  There really are only the two components in these things (the hard drive is a mSATA SSD and pops off the old board and on to the new board easily).  I am reduced to thinking that maybe the new screen was a dud?  Well – the old screen (that worked, just had a crack) wont come on either.  So I’m at wits end – and – I would up buying an identical nice condition unit for my customer to get them back up and going – and I will revisit this horroshow at some future time.

A side note – you never know how GOOD a computer store is – till something goes WRONG.  But I have NEVER penalized a customer in a case anything like this (and this is the weirdest case I’ve had in years!).  So customer first, customer always is our moto.  ‘Hit the road jack’ is more the motto of others 🙂

Take care folks.  and look forward to hear from you!