Quick hint: if you’re having trouble getting wireless backups on Time Machine and an Airport Extreme working, then try this - I had the same problem and fixed it for me. Plug the USB drive in to your Mac and using disk utility, veryify and repair the disk not the actual partition. Alternatively, remove all existing partitions from your drive, and then recreate the necessary partitions for your backup scenario. It seems that if you only verify / repair the partitions then the Airport Extreme won’t necessarily mount the drive properly (meaning you can’t use it as an Airdisk, and you can’t use it with Time Machine.)
No guarantee this will work for you and also note: wireless backups create sparsebundles (as opposed to real actual files) so it’s more of a headache to restore from a backup. But wireless backups are far less of a headache than having to periodically plug my Macbook Pro in to the drive, so for me, it’s worth it.
I have the latest generation of Macbook Pro, which came as stock with the Intel Core Duo 2 2.5ghz processor, 250gb 5400RPM HDD and 2gb RAM. As standard it was flat-out awesome, incorporating the new touchpad that is seen on the Macbook Air and some of the features you get from the iPhone and iPod Touch. OSX Leopard was pre-installed and is fantastic and a perfect example of what milestone releases should be like: Tiger was great - Leopard has taken that and actually enhanced it, whilst maintaining all the stability and core features you were used to. Unlike certain other upgrades, which took a reasonably stable operating system (XP) and created a whole shitstorm of a mess with its “upgrade” (Vista.)
But if you’re anything like me, then “stock” really isn’t good enough and I was intrigued to know what tweaks and upgrades I could make to really make this beast fly. So here are a few pointers:
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Internet trolls might call me an Apple fanboy, but I wouldn’t say I am. I am just one of the happy people who made the switch a couple of years ago, and I am well-pleased that I did. I started with the Mac Mini - which seemed like the cheapest way to find out what the switch would be like - all went well - and so have since bought a Macbook Pro. Which all went great, aside from a snafu over the definition of Apple retail versus Apple store.
Anyway, with the new stock MBP in hand, I started looking at upgrading the RAM, from 2gb to 4gb. After finding the specs, first stop was the Apple store to see their prices. You can imagine I was a little taken aback to see that 4gb (2 sticks of 2gb) was a staggering $600 - I’m well aware that Apple hardware is more expensive than most, but $600 seemed ridiculous. And indeed it is - I picked up 4gb of Kingston (a more than reputable memory manufacturer) for $125 from Amazon. I could also have got Crucial or Samsung, for a similar price. Intrigued, I decided to call the Apple store, just to find out why their RAM was so damn expensive. I mean, $200 I could undrstand, maybe $250, but a full FOUR times more expensive? No way. I didn’t really know what answer to expect, so I just went ahead:
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