MacBook - h/w upgrade complete - recommended!

[Snips]

Hi,

Although I had my credit card itching to splurge prior to this week's MB/MBP announcements, in the end I was uninspired by the upgrades.

However, My 2006 MacBook (2.0Ghz processor, 1Gb RAM, 80Gb drive) was indeed of a boost... so I decided yesterday to save the bulk of my cash, and go for some interim upgrades of my current machine.

Given the cash I was saving by taking this route, and my impatience to get on with it, I didn't bother shopping around and just went with what my local computer store was offering (I could have probably saved 10-20% by shopping online?).

Anyway, after half a day's effort, I've now upgraded to 2Gb RAM and a 250Gb internal drive - awesome!

The extra drive space speaks for itself; early impressions of the RAM upgrade are very positive (mixed in with a clean install of Leopard ).

I'm in the UK, with corresponding rip-off prices, so rather than splash 1200 pounds on an admittedly faster 2.4GHz machine, with 2Gb RAM and 250Gb drive, I've achieved the same RAM and drive upgrades for under 200 pounds - not a bad deal! I've also invested my time, but that would have been roughly equivalent had I had to prep a brand new machine. Meanwhile, my cash is now sat waiting for an update from Apple that is sufficiently tempting

I have to say that Time Machine was fantastic during this process, and exceeded my expectations. I knew I'd be able to carry forward my data whichever way I went, but I expected to have to choose between a reinstall (from back-up) of my entire machine on to the new drive (including the existing 'legacy' installation of Leopard I had, which was an upgrade from Tiger), or installing Leopard from scratch, and having to re-install all apps I'd added. As it was, I was able to perform a clean from scratch installation of Leopard, but still carry forward all my apps and data - the best of both worlds.

Here's the detail of what I did:

1. Used time machine to back up the entire machine onto an external USB drive.
2. Upgraded the RAM to 2 X 1GB DDR2 PC2-5300 SODIMMS.
3. Upgraded the drive to a 250Gb SATA 2.5" model (this happened to be Hitachi).
4. Switched machine on with Leopard upgrade disk in the drive.
5. I took the opportunity to check the System Config (System Profiler) and confirmed the new disk capacity and RAM config - all good!
6. Performed a clean installation of Leopard.
7. Can't recall the exact detail here, but it was obvious from the choices I was presented with: I was offered the option to transfer settings and data from a Time Machine Backup which I did (I was able to configure which accounts etc I specifically wanted to carry forward).
8. The restoration of apps and data from Time Machine was performed without any issues.
9. I rebooted, and had a recognisable desktop (a good sign!).
10. I checked for software updates, and relived the 10.5.2 update, and Leopard graphics update (as expected, given my Leopard update was from DVD). Meanwhile, the improved performance was already noticable!
11. Perform another Time Machine backup (which was seemingly recognised as an incremental back-up of the machine).
12. Job done!