Think it's too hard for you to upgrade the RAM on your MacBook Pro? Not at all. In this video Dave will show you step-by-step how to disassemble the Pro, pull out the old RAM, insert the new RAM and close it back up. And - most importantly - have it work!

Keywords: MacBook, Pro, RAM, Upgrade, How, To

I'm frequently asked by people for recommendations on computers and while I generally encourage people to always go for the fastest, newest they can afford, I've also started to appreciate the amazing deals you can find with factory refurbished gear. Whether you're an Apple fanboy or a PC person, all the big manufacturers find that they have excess stock when they roll out new models, and those 12-18 month old models can be great deals!

The biggest limitation for modern computing, however, and this is true whether you're running Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows or even Linux, is the amount of memory you have in the system. Known as "RAM" or random access memory, it's what all the running applications use to manage and process data. Have too little and you'll find that you can only run one app without things slowing down, but have a lot and every application you use will run faster, often noticeably faster.

That's why even though I had 4GB of RAM in my mid-2010 Apple MacBook Pro, I was very interested in an upgrade to 8GB from Otherworld Computing, a company that's long been a friend of AskDaveTaylor. My concern was how difficult it would be to disassemble my tightly integrated MacBook, pop out the old memory cards and insert new ones without messing up the rest of the system.

I don't have much spare money, but now when I check the battery status on my MacBook it doesn't just show the remaining time (which is always alarmingly short!) but it says "Replace Now". Yikes. Can I ignore that, or do I need to replace my MacBook battery, and if so, how much does it cost??

I spend a lot of time using my laptop, an Apple MacBook Pro, and for years I have had various stickers on the cover, a montage of brands and vendors. After a while, though, that become a bit tiring and when I saw more and more other people with the same sort of random pastiche of stickers, well, it was time to do something else.

Enter GelaSkins. After checking out their cool, super colorful "skins" for various devices at trade shows, I decided it'd be fun to get one for my MacBook and try a single full size sticker instead of a lot of little stickers. Their PR team was quite forthcoming in sending a discount code so I took the leap.

The biggest challenge? Figuring out which of the hundreds of different designs I wanted to have emblazoned on my laptop.

At a conference last week i saw someone make some sort of finger motion on his MacBook Air trackpad and have the screen "zoom in" and get bigger, so he could explain something to his listeners. Awesome. I want. How do I do this?

I need to go into the Apple Store to talk with them about my broken iPod [ed note: see my article how to fix your broken iPod first, perhaps it'll help?] and was told that it's far smarter to make an appointment at the "Genius Bar" than to just walk in and hope that there's space in the schedule. How do I make a genius bar appointment?

This is kinda crazy, but if I have my MacBook Pro running when I'm controlling my new Apple TV with the little remote, it actually also responds to the button pushes. Where this gets crazy is if I'm looking for a video or popping around on Netflix: suddenly my laptop starts playing music too! Is there some way to disable this weird feature?

I saw a demo of a video chat using FaceTime where one person was on their MacBook and the other was on their iPhone 4. Incredible! How do I set up my Mac so I can have face to face chats with my girlfriend, even when she's on the road with her iPhone 4?

Okay, so I now know how to pair a cellphone with my Mac via Bluetooth - thank you! - but I am still unclear about how to actually transfer a file to the device. Can you shed light on this additional step, Dave?

I saw your earlier article about how to pair a bluetooth speaker with a Mac OS X system, but am wondering about how to do the same with my son's older LG phone? I know that the iPhone has a good connection with the Mac OS X system, but what about other cellphones that support bluetooth? How do you pair 'em?

My brother sent me some really cool wireless bluetooth speakers for my computer and I can't figure out how to make them work. Is there some secret to getting a MacBook to use a bluetooth speaker system?

I have an iPad and a MacBook Pro and it struck me that it should be possible for me to use the iPad as a second display. Can I do that? If so, what's the best solution that doesn't cost an arm and a leg?

I got a very nice card from my grandma that included $10 "to buy some music for my new apple phone". It wasn't a gift card, though, so I figured I'd just buy the music directly in the iTunes Store on my iPhone and drop the $10 in the bank. Did it, but now I'm baffled: how do I copy that purchased music onto my MacBook Pro laptop? Do I need to download it again from the iTunes Store, or can iTunes just pull it from the phone?

I've been using Keynote for presentations for a long time (Keynote's part of the iWork package from Apple and only runs on Mac OS X). Recently a friend told me about "Keynote Remote", an app that runs on the Apple iPhone and lets you control the presentation, even if you're not facing your computer. Sounds cool, and I downloaded it, but can't figure out how to get the two to talk together.

Every time I buy a new computer, I go through extraordinary levels of hassle copying files from the old computer to the new one, and this time I am determined to do something smarter. I heard from a friend that since I use Time Machine (actually, I have a Time Capsule for network backups) that when I get my new MacBook I can just tap the Time Machine backup of my existing system and have it restore every single file and config onto the new system and have it a perfect clone. Rockin'. How do I do that??

I can still remember the first Mac I used: it was a 512K unit that the fine folk at the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link loaned me when they hired me to hack their discussion system and make it faster. At the time I'd just left my job at Hewlett-Packard and had no computer of my own (back then people didn't have computers unless they were hardware hobbyists or could handle cassette backups).

To the proffered loaner Macintosh I can recall saying "uh, no thanks, I don't really need a toy computer. I'll figure out another way to connect to your computer network." At the time, I was living in Los Altos, basically southwest of Palo Alto and due north of Apple headquarters in Cupertino, and the WELL was located north of the Golden Gate bridge in beautiful Sausalito. Way too far to drive for the work. So I had to get a computer of some sort.

I reluctantly accepted the dorky little fishbowl unit that was reminiscent of the Osborne my Dad had won in a sweepstakes a year or two earlier, and...

I'm perpetually running out of disk space on my computers. If you follow me on Twitter (I'm @DaveTaylor), you've probably seen me every so often send out a message asking about this, that or the other upgrade path for one of my computers because things are filling up.

That's why when I saw that TechRestore was offering a 500GB internal drive upgrade path for my trusty MacBook Pro, I was quite interested. My existing drive at the time was only 149GB in size (that's actual usable size) and it was about 90% full, and that was with me sporadically pruning everything.

I contacted Shannon Jean at TechRestore and asked if they'd run an upgrade for me so I could see how the process worked, in return for me sharing the experience with you, my readers, and they agreed.

Here's how it went...

This may be a bit of a mundane question, but I'm wondering exactly what disk drive is included in my Apple Macbook. How do I figure out the exact hard drive model number and size?

A pal of mine showed me how she'd set up her MacBook to allow her to just gently tap on the trackpad to send a "click" to the operating system, as if she'd clicked on the mouse button. Very cool. How do I set up my MacBook Pro to let me do the same thing?

My Mac has a rather flaky lid catch and I'd love to figure out a way that I can disable the "wake on lid open" capability of the MacBook. I understand that there is some sort of solution, but for the life of me I can't find anything!