So many screws...

Yesterday was another bike ride with Andy. We decided to go a different way this time, heading up through Henllan. Sounded good in theory, but it was quite a long haul up to Henllan, then there was a massive drop out of the village. This led to a truly ridiculous hill, which was horrible. We got nearly to the top and then had to turn off and make our way to St Asaph along some back roads, which was actually really nice. Once we got to St Asaph we did our usual route around back to Denbigh, but we were knackered because of the earlier hills, and we screwed up nutrition so we were really tired.

In the evening it was Rob's birthday meal, which was in the Guildhall Tavern in Denbigh. It was a well attended event with nearly 30 people, and was really good fun. The weather finally broke, and when people were leaving it was absolutely chucking it down.

Today has been a fairly lazy day so far. Fortunately the little toolkit I picked up with useful screwdriver bits turned up, so I was able to disassemble the MacBook Pro with the annoying T6 screws. It's now got a larger faster hard drive with a clean install of Mountain Lion, and fresh thermal paste on the heatsink. I had to take it apart twice though as I accidentally tightened the heatsink screws too much the first time, so when it booted back up the CPU was idling at 100 degrees...ouch! It's running much cooler now than it did originally, with the CPU idling at around 45 degrees and the GPU at 59 degrees, which seems pretty good for these machines as they apparently run hot by default. It's definitely running cooler than when I first got it. I think someone had tried to regunk the heatsink before, but not done a very good job.

The first time I took it apart, it took ages as I was meticulously following the iFixit guide and keeping track of all the screws. The second time I didn't care and had the logic board out in about 10 minutes, but I still got it back together with no leftover screws. These older MBPs are a bit of a sod to take apart, wonder what the unibody ones are like.

Ah well, so far so good. Next is to put some more RAM in it assuming I can find some suitable DIMMs. At the moment it only has 2gb, and the maximum for some weird reason is 6gb. Odd. I'd also like to put an SSD in it as putting them in my other machines has definitely made me a convert.

Forgot to mention that the car had some more work done. The whining engine was cured by a couple of new pulleys and the chugging noise was a disconnected pipe. The snapped rear seatbelt was replaced and also the seal on the top of the fuel tank. It's definitely getting there...