Whew! Just about done, I think. Yesterday morning, I decided to finally start setting up the little guy and proceeded to open up his guts in order to install 2 sticks of 2 gig ram I had picked up on sale at Best Buy. Unfortunately, it seems that Apple really really tightens the screws holding down the faceplate over the memory slots. I tried using a straight-blade screwdriver from an eyeglass repair kit but the tip snapped off.
Geeze! Ok, a setback but not that big of a deal. Ran over to Canadian Tire a few hours later to get a Phillips #00 screwdriver and after much hemming and hawing picked up a large screwdriver set for a very good price. From the looks of it, I can now work assemble anything and everything that Ikea has. Ran home, opened up the MBP’s guts and installed the ram. Decided to let it charge for several hours before going any further.
After dinner, I decided to start the process of moving everything over and letting Setup Assistant do its magic while I slept. I figured that it would need at least two hours to move everything over using FW400. The MBP has FW800 but my G4 only has FW400. I am very happy that LaCie included all sorts of cables with the Quadra drive so it was a simple matter of unplugging and replugging.
Setback when I pressed the power button on the MBP and it started making a series of three loud and long beeps! Uh oh. Panic time. I immediately looked online for suggestions and it seemed to be either bad ram or bad logic board. Uh oh. I popped in the old Apple ram and I still got the same result! Thinking it’s time for another shower. I checked again and discovered that the ram might not be seated properly. I also discovered that if you did NOT seat and tighten very well the faceplate, the battery might not flip up enough when you unclip it to take it out. You need to have it flip up enough to lever it out of its groove. Grrr..after much pushing down and massaging the plate, I got the battery out and reinstalled the memory. Turn it back on…
Yay! I get the multilingual Welcome scene. Soon after it’s time to enter Target Disk Mode so that I can use Setup Assistant to move everything over from the old computer to the new MBP. Oops…another setback. You’re supposed to restart the old machine and hold down the “T” key while doing so. Unfortunately, because I am using an Apple Extended II keyboard hooked up to the G4’s old USB keyboard, the G4 did not recognize the “T” signal and so it just went on to the log-in screen. More puzzlement this time around than panic. More searching on the Apple support pages before figuring out that the Extended II might be the problem and it was.
So, TDM and the transfer was on! The MBP indicated that it would take over two hours so I decided to just let it run, shower and crash since all of this was making serious inroads to my sleep-time.
I’d like to say that I was woken up by the dawn’s lengthening rays but the truth was it was a hungry cat pawing at my face. Ok, after feeding the felines, I shut down the MBP and flipped it over for more surgery. Reinstalled the new 2 gig sticks and, with some trepidation, hit the Power button. Success! Oh wait…setback…the Apple Extended II keyboard was not recognized right off the bat but the OS had me pressing a couple of keys on it before it finally decided it was some sort of generic 101-key keyboard. How ironic..you’d think that Apple would have its OS recognize one of its most popular keyboards!
Next step was to set up the Boot Camp partition so I can install Windows XP or Vista or whatever in the future. Since I had no clue as to how big of a partition I would need I simply went with the 32 gigs that Boot Camp suggested. This was probably the easiest thing done throughout this whole episode. I then proceeded to hook up various peripherals to the MBP which right now means about seven items - one power cord, two mice, one SD card reader, monitor, keyboard, headphones, and a LaCie Quadra HD. The MBP looks more like a hub than it does a laptop.
Ok, now, getting on to the Internet in order to download updates for the system. Checking Network under System Preferences shows that Airport does not seem to detect my wireless network although the laptop is almost sitting on top of the wireless LAN router. This is a good thing because it means that the router’s wireless SSID is not being broadcasted. I also see at least half a dozen other wireless networks around the place which is down from the dozen that my Thinkpad had detected a couple of years ago. The most likely explanation for this is that the MBP’s aluminum skin is impeding it from detecting more signals. Another thing to note is that all of the other wireless networks are now locked down; two to three years ago, this was not the case.
I decided to plug in an Ethernet cable instead of futzing around with Airport for now and was able to get on to the Internet within seconds. I was not absolutely positive that Airport’s not-detecting my WLAN was the result of the wireless SSID not being broadcasted. The fact that I could get on to the Internet so quickly with the Ethernet was very reassuring since it also meant that once Airport picked up my WLAN I really shouldn’t have any further difficulties getting online. I looked into how to mirror the MBP on to my widescreen LCD and then looked up how to use it while the MBP had its lid down. Very nice once I fiddled around with the display settings but the entire process is also awkward enough that I am loathe to disconnect the MBP now. You have to follow the steps precisely or you’d end up fruitlessly clicking away at the mouse or keyboard trying to wake the laptop.
Ok, so, time to try the Airport connection once again. I typed in the name and password of the wireless network into the Network setting and, I have to admit I was really hoping it would work since I could not tell if my wireless LAN was actually running or not. But, I was online once again in seconds. I later decided to have the router’s wireless SSID be broadcasted in case any friends come over with a laptop and needed connectivity. Highly unlikely but you never know. So, Airport was running and it was time to run Software Update which entailed downloading a couple of hundred megs of updates. Time for breakfast.
Updates went really well afterwards but this entire process took a good five hours of futzing around. Of course, now that I know what to do I’m pretty sure that I can get it down to less than half the time. The real stumbling block here was the mucked-up memory installation which made me sweat for a bit with visions of fighting the crowd over at the Apple Genius Bar but that’s all.
System is VERY fast and it’s a grand to see in Activity Monitor that there are no Page Ins/Page Outs at all, courtesy of the memory upgrade. 
