Last week, I gave my 2007 MacBook Pro laptop a makeover before upgrading to Leopard, aka OS X 10.5.

A couple of months ago, I bought 4GB RAM for less than $100, to replace the 2GB that it came with.

I wanted to upgrade the drive too, as I repeatedly came close to filling the original 160GB drive. It was no problem to get a 5400 RPM drive that had more than 300GB, but the 7200 RPM notebook drives were topping out at 200GB. Two weeks, I spotted a Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200 RPM SATA drive on NewEgg for $180. Sold!

I installed it the night it arrived, and it was quite the ordeal. I followed the iFixit instructions and it took me a solid hour to disassemble the case, replace the drive, and close it all back up. There are eight pages of photos and more than 30 tiny, fiddly screws to deal with. I also needed two special screwdrivers, a really small Phillips head and a Torx T6. The similar ExtremeTech instructions conclude by telling you how to format the new drive with Disk Utility from the OS installer DVD; I also used Disk Utility to partition the drive.

By comparison, I also bought a 250GB IDE drive for my old Compaq laptop at the same time. (That machine's problems turned out to be bad sectors on the original drive.) Only two screws have to be removed to get the drive cage out, and another four to take the drive out of the cage. Five minutes work.

My new Mac drive is very favorably reviewed by Tech Report, which gives it the Editor's Choice award. It seems faster, but I didn't bother to benchmark the old drive. That drive is now sitting in a USB enclosure, and will do very nicely for Time Machine backups.

Tomas Restrepo wrote a post about sharing dotfiles between Windows and Ubuntu, specifically about sharing .vimrc (Linux) and _vimrc (Windows) and the .vim (Linux) and vimfiles (Windows) directories.

I have a different solution. On Windows, my C:\AutoExec.bat includes:

set HOME=C:\gvr
set VIM=C:\Vim
set VIMDIR=%VIM%\vim71
set EDITOR=%VIMDIR%\gvim.exe
set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Win32app;C:\GnuWin32\bin;C:\UnxUtils;C:\SysInternals;C:\Python25\Scripts

%HOME% (C:\gvr) contains _vimrc, vimfiles, and other stuff accumulated over many years. This directory is stored in a personal Subversion repository at DevjaVu. All my Vim files are stored with Unix LF endings, not Windows CR-LFs, so that they'll work on my Mac OS X and Linux boxen. I play some games with if has("win32") and if has('gui_macvim') to ensure that my _vimrc works cross-platform.

On my *nix boxes, the gvr folder lives under my home directory at ~/gvr, and ~/.vimrc and ~/.vim are symlinks:

$ ln -s ~/gvr/_vimrc ~/.vimrc
$ ln -s ~/gvr/vimfiles/ ~/.vim

In addition, the dotfiles that I keep in SVN are stored locally in ~/gvr/dotfiles without a leading period in their names, which makes them easy to see:

$ ln -s ~/gvr/dotfiles/bashrc ~/.bashrc

This arrangement works well for me.

I ordered a 17" Mac Book Pro on Friday night. It shipped from Shanghai on Monday and arrived at work this morning. Scha-weet! And spendy.

I've been busy ramping up all day. I estimate that my total lifetime usage of Macs was about one day before today. I definitely have some new habits to learn.

So far, I've installed Mac Vim, Firefox (browser), Camino (browser), Thunderbird (email), Quicksilver (fast launch utility), Witch (window switcher), AntiRSI (RSI preventer), Adium (multi-protocol chat), Skype (Internet telephony), Remote Desktop Connection (connecting to Windows desktops), StuffIt Expander (for classic archives), and KeePassX (password manager).

Some of these have built-in equivalents of course, but I'm using these for compatibility with my existing Windows and Linux setups and data (e.g., Thunderbird, KeePassX) or because I'm too entrenched to change (Vim).

My laptop scared the crap out of me last night. I came home to find it in a completely unresponsive state: it would not wake up. The hard disk LED was a solid green. I power cycled it and it refused to boot.

It did, however, boot from a Kubuntu Edgy CD, but it did not recognize the hard disk. In desperation, I booted into the BIOS and played with the disk-related menus. That fixed the problem, but I don't know what went wrong, and my faith is shaken in the reliability of this system.

I bought the laptop just over three years ago, shortly before I quit Microsoft, as a replacement for the work laptop that I had been using. It's served me well. I have a reasonably beefy desktop system of the same age, but I almost always use the laptop instead. It's a Compaq Presario X1012QV, with a 1.3GHz Centrino, a WXGA screen, 35GB hard disk, and 1280MB RAM. It had 512MB RAM originally, but I replaced one of the 256MB sticks with a 1GB stick last year, making it more pleasant to use.

For several months now, I've been planning to buy a new Vista-ready laptop this spring, with a Core 2 Duo, ~100GB disk, and 2+GB RAM. I want a 64-bit CPU so that I can occasionally run Win64; e.g., to update the Win64 port of Vim. I'm severely tempted by Apple and expect to end up with some kind of Mac laptop — my first ever Mac. I was hoping to hold out until Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard) comes out sometime this spring, but the latest rumors say that it's "edging the very limit of the definition of 'Spring' — i.e. mid-June". If the Presario craps out on me again, I'll replace it in short order.

Whether I go with Mac or stick with a PC, I'll continue to run multiple OSes. Kubuntu Linux has been my primary operating system since last June, and I think it's unlikely that Vista will replace it. OSX may well do so.