As you can imagine, as soon as I got the RAM I was pretty eager to get it into my machine. I flipped over the macbook popped out the battery and attempted to unscrew 3 tiny screws which held a thin metal plate over the RAM and hard drive. My first problem was that the screws are really tiny. My tiny screwdriver was too big. The next day I stopped at Radio Shack and picked up a set of 5 tiny screwdrivers (for $5) only to discover that one of the screws was completely stuck. I checked online and it seems that stuck screws is a bit of a problem. Luckily, I borrowed a pair of pliers from Cheryl to get a better grip on the screwdriver. With enough pressure I managed to loosen the screw. After that, zero problems.

The RAM was recognized immediately and the performance has been better than I expected. Things like dashboard and expose are much more responsive as is swapping between large apps. So I totally recommend the hardware especially considering it was less than $200.

• i quickly got used to the 2-finger scrolling and the 2-finger right button click
• i guess i still have to get used to figuring out whether I need to click alt, ctrl, or the apple-key
• the shade of green on awardtour looks pretty different compared to what I see on Windows
• frontrow is really slick
• I tired out iMovieHD using the built-in iSight. I was suprised how confusing it was to do some things, but for the most part it was dead simple. I was also impressed how quickly it rendered things considering the macbook uses an integrated video card
• skype wasn’t working very well for me. My audio echo’d and when I turned the volume up it created some odd feedback. I had none of these problems with ichat
• why is the chat window in ichat so ugly?
• Installed Quicksilver. I don’t get what the big deal is? Is it more useful with custom scripts? It also uses a lot of ram. I also found it was just as easy to use spotlight to launch apps and find files.
• For torrents, I installed the lightweight transmission, the very nice xtorrent, and the large and bulky java-based azureus. Unfortunately, both transmission and xtorrent were banned on some of my torrent boards for inappropriate protocol implementations. This left me with Azureus. I’m not too happy about that.

On the browser front, I installed camino and firefox to compare them with safari. I originally thought there was no way i’d use safari as gmail isn’t fully supported but since I have google chat in Adium I might reconsider. Camino didn’t have all the options I wanted so I installed Firefoxy which replaces the horribly ugly form elements in firefox (like radio buttons and text windows) with some nicer ones. I think I’ll be sticking with Firefox. I need something like a three finger click for “open a link in a new tab”.