About This Mac

Alessia writes:

How can i check the speed of the hard disk drive in my macbook pro. Im not sure if its 5400 rpm or 7200rpm. I couldn’t find it on the section “about this mac”

You’re not alone in trying to find this. It would be very nice if Apple could somehow publish the speed of your drive in the ‘About This Mac’ specs on your computer. Here’s one way to figure it out though:

In the ‘About This Mac’ section, which it sounds like you’ve found but for those following at home you can find it by clicking on the Apple logo in the top left corner of your screen:

… and then clicking on ‘More Info’

Look under the Serial-ATA section of the ‘Hardware’ area. You should see a brand and model of your hard drive listed. In my case, it’s a Hitachi HTS541612J9SA00:

Take that model number - again, mine is HTS541612J9SA00 but yours could be different brand/model number - and throw it into Google:

In my case I ended up at Hitachi’s web site (http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/5k160/5k160.htm) and could see that my drive was listed in a series that has a 5400rpm spin speed.

Once you see all the rest of the specs there, you could probably figure out from your original part number what the seemingly random numbers/letters mean.

HTS541612J9SA00

For my MacBook Pro’s drive, the “54″ is probably referring to the speed (5400rpm), the 12 is short for 120GB and “SA” stands for Serial ATA.

Your mileage may vary as it all depends on which manufacturer and model of hard drive Apple decided to use in your laptop and whether or not that particular manufacturer maintains an online list of their hard drives.

Alvin writes:

How can I find out what size my Hard Drive is on my 15inch Macbook Pro.
Its processor speed only says 1.87???THANKS

One way to do this is by looking for the Macintosh HD icon on your desktop like this:

Right click (or CTRL-click if you’re using a single button mouse or a laptop) on the icon and you should see this:

Left click on ‘Get Info.’

The screen that appears next should have a bunch of information about your hard drive, and in the ‘General’ section (you may have to click the triangle to open up the information) you should see this:

The capacity on this computer states 111.47GB which is actually a 120GB hard drive (visit this wikipedia entry for an explanation of why the difference in sizes under the section titled ‘Consumer Confusion). It’s got 27.81GB available and 83.66GB used.

While the default account image may be okay for awhile, pretty soon you’re going to want to personalize your Mac a bit - to make it more YOU. Here’s how to change your account picture:

Step 1: In the top left corner of your screen, look for the Apple icon and left click it.

Step 2: You should see a drop down list appear, look for “System Preferences” and left click it:

Step 3: You are now looking at the System Preferences for, you guessed it, your system (or computer). There’s a bunch of different settings you can change here, some of which will do more “damage” than others. For now, look for an icon that looks like two heads/shoulders labeled “Accounts.” Left click the Accounts icon:

Step 4: You will now see your account listed on the left hand side (under the label “My Account”) as well as a Guest Account and any other accounts you have created on your Mac (under the label “Other Accounts”). In the middle of the screen, you should see your current account picture (your image may be different from the one shown below). Left click on your current picture and you should see a drop down gallery of many different icons included with your Mac. Left click on one you like to change it.

I chose a soccer ball. All done.

About This Mac Extra:

For a really personalized account picture, why not use a picture of yourself? When you clicked on your current account picture in Step 4 above one of the other options was “Edit Picture.” Click that and then choose “Take a video snapshot” to use the built-in iSight camera in your Mac to take a picture of yourself. Once you’re happy with your photo, click “Set” to set it as your account picture.