Add a keyboard shortcut with your favourite tool, like FastScripts or Quicksilver.

The script can be found on GitHub: Next Unread Message for Apple Mail

Now, nothing really bad had happened to the machine yet, but when live and die by a single machine you tend to trust your instincts with these kinds of things. The hard disk was definitely threatening to take a dirt nap.

In one of the few signs of intelligence I’ve managed to display over the past few years, I have regular Time Machine backups, so I wasn’t overly concerned about losing any work. It was more an issue of timing… when was this thing going to bite it, and what would I be working on while it happened? And how could I circumvent the inevitable 2-3 day layover associated with the local Mac repair shop? (Keep in mind, there’s no Apple store — hence, no genius bar — in Calgary). Then it occurred to me: why simply replace the hard drive when I could upgrade it?

Enter the Seagate 7200RPM, 160GB Momentus, hard drive of kings. At a mere $125, how could I not? Well, except for the warrantee violating thing. But that had expired already, and I like to play with stuff, so off I went to purchase my shiny new toy.

The Macbook Pro wasn’t really designed with a user-replacable hard drive, but I’ve never been one to let 25 microscopic screws get in the way of my fun. (As an aside, as a 12-year-old I once disassembled my Atari Lynx to clean Dr. Pepper out from behind the d-pad, so I have a history of these sorts of ventures). After depositing the cats in yard for safety, I set about lovingly removing nano-screw after nano-screw, carefully storing them in tiny ceramic bowls for later reinsertion. The actual drive replacement went fairly smoothly, and within about half an hour I was booting up the Leopard Installation disk.

Time Machine usage is fairly well documented from within Mac OS, but using as a pure recovery drive has only been covered in a handful of places. Of course, in a rather genius decision, at some point in the past I had decided to exclude my System folder from Time Machine, and then promptly forgot about it. I imagine this saved a few GB of space on my Time Machine drive, but scared the hell out of me when I attempted to use the Leopard Installer to restore the backup.

No matter though, as the Migration Assistant (launched on first boot of the new system) brilliantly offers to import everything from the backup drive. A few hours later, and all was magically well. In fact, almost creepily perfect. Everything, from the placement of my icons to the default launch services, came up exactly as it had on the old drive. And FAST. Stunningly FAST. The upgrade from 5400RPM to 7200RPM is exactly what I was hoping for.

Of course, over the next few hours I discovered a few gotchas. It turns out aligning the case perfectly while closing it is pretty tough — my latch is a bit tighter than it had been. And Firefox, for some reason, gobbled up 95% CPU whenever I clicked on anything, although a quick re-install solved that problem. And the Time Machine drive itself didn’t want to accept new backups until I wiped it and started over, which was also a fairly stressful few hours.

Otherwise… another successful project, and one I’d highly recommend to anyone as crazy as me.

In any case, Leopard Day arrived and I happily set about installing it on my Macbook Pro after making a full system backup on my new Seagate FreeAgent Go external drive. I’d be interested to see a correlation between external hard drive sales and the release of Leopard, as I’m fairly certain you’d see a fairly hefty spike. As an aside, the FreeAgent is a nice little drive that satisfies my major requirements: lightweight, and bus powered (meaning it doesn’t need an external power supply). It’s not overwhelmingly fast (it took about 3 hours for SuperDuper! to archive my 70gigs of data), but once Time Machine gets running I don’t notice it at all.

It’s taken a few days to get fully comfortable with Leopard. I have run across a few annoyances (and bugs) but the good definitely outweighs the bad.

Without further padding the content of this post, here’s a collection of thoughts and tweaks related to Leopard that you might find interesting:

• The Address Book no longer has support for Bluetooth devices. This is disappointing, but Blue Phone Elite looks like a good replacement for that functionality, as well as what Proximity provides.
• On a related note, Proximity seems to work just fine, as does everything else in my Calendar Synchronization post (excepting, of course, the Address Book SMS stuff).
• Quicksilver was picking up the backup copies of my applications from the Time Machine drive. To disable this, in Quicksilver select Catalog / Applications and de-select “Find All Applications”
• Spotlight was finding stuff on my Time Machine drive as well. I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, as the drive wasn’t empty when I initially plugged it in, and various posts in the Apple discussion groups seem to indicate it’s not a common problem. Solved by adding the Time Machine backup directory to Spotlight’s Privacy page.
• Spaces is great, but I wish it were a little more configurable. I run a multi-monitor setup most of the time (laptop sits open to one side of an external monitor). What I would really like is to have separate “spaces” for each monitor. Unfortunately, Spaces sees the two monitors as one large workspace, and switching to a new space swaps both. I would prefer to have Mail, iCal and iTunes open on the laptop monitor at all times, but setting those apps to “All Spaces” makes a big mess when I disconnect the laptop and run as a single screen.
• Spaces seems to have several bugs related to switching applications. In truth, I don’t know if these are bugs in the apps or in Spaces, but certain apps don’t behave themselves very well. For example, Cmd-Tabbing to Firefox will send me back to the correct Space but not activate Firefox. Adium doesn’t seem to respect the “All Spaces” command very well. And Photoshop CS3 has trouble with it’s fading UI elements when you activate it from another Space. None of these are show-stoppers, but hopefully they will get resolved fairly soon.
• The FreeAgent Go comes with a double-headed USB connector – one for data, and one for power. Turns out, you only need the data plug connected on the Macbook Pro. This is nice, as the MBP only has 2 USB ports and they are on opposite sides of the machine. The additional power connector is, allegedly, only required for certain laptops that don’t provide enough power over a single port. Fair enough, but the MBP does so you can forgo plugging them both in.
• I’ve had a few power-related issues since the update. Once, the system crashed when waking from sleep. On another occasion, the system refused to power down. Finder stopped, but the OS hung showing nothing but desktop. I have a suspicion this is related to Bluetooth devices (doh!). I’ve also had a few occasions where, when reconnecting the external monitor, I log in and the system immediately goes to sleep. I can wake it and log in immediately with no harm, but it’s still odd. I’m considering resetting the system manager to see if that clears things up.