Success! (Or, how I sledgehammered my ancient Mac into accepting more memory)

When Mountain Lion came out, I was dismayed to discover that my beloved 2006 laptop is now obsolete; Mountain Lion only works on computers released in mid-2007 and later. Sadness. So I decided to get my poor old MacBook a present to make us both feel better: A whole new gig of memory. (Hey, that’s a lot by 2006 standards. Plus it’s all my old laptop can handle.)

Now, I consider myself a techie person only in relation to the outsides of computers. I do software stuff. I’ve never opened up a computer before. But some of my technical communication students wrote instructions for installing additional RAM a few semesters ago, and they made it sound so easy. So I bought a matched pair of 1GB SO-DIMMs from Other World Computing (which has a website that’s great for figuring out compatibility) and went to work.

Well, I backed up the computer first. I’m not a total idiot.

I took out the battery, unscrewed those teeny screws, removed the L-bracket, and replaced the memory. Everything fit back together, albeit not as nicely as it had before I messed with it, but the battery fit back in all right.

Then I got the blinking light of death. Which means the memory wasn’t seated correctly and I had to take everything back apart. Which was a problem, because the battery was stuck.

In hindsight, I’m lucky my husband didn’t walk in while I was banging my laptop, sledgehammer-style, against the couch in an attempt to dislodge the battery.

However, I’m happy to report that sledgehammering your laptop does, in fact, remove recalcitrant batteries. So, in the end, here’s my result:

Success!