And now, a little more on the very cool macbook. now that i have had chance to use it for a little time i have come to like it even more. i put in the 2gigs of ram and that made all the difference. it is now one heck of a machine. i got mine from other world computing but you can get it almost anywhere. i recommend owc or new egg or crucial.
i managed to get all my info transferred over from the powerbook and now most of the apps seem to work. some are, of course, not universal such as microsoft office or photoshop, but even those still open pretty fast and are able to be used with no problem. although, as i said before, more memory does help.
the first time you open them it does take a minute but after that they run just fine. as well as they did on my previous laptop, the 12“ powerbook with 1.5 ghz g4 processor ( a great machine that i will miss). fortunately, the powerbook found a good home with my friend zach from laist and the oaks so i know its being put to good use. he will treat it well.
so, a few more thoughts on the macbook:
the black is starting to show more crap from my fingers. mostly on the track pad but some on the rest of it too. not so bad but a little annoying. it can be cleaned and the stuff seems to come off pretty easy by just rubbing it with a soft cloth such as the kind you used to get with every sony ericcson cell phone. soft is the key here as i don’t really know how much this thing could scratch if i pressed harder.
also, i am still not in love with the keyboard. although, as i use it more i find that it gets easier. it might be because i am a lazy typer and was very used to the keys being so close together so now that they are not, i am getting more typos. i think apple will realize that this keyboard isn’t very good and perhaps make some changes to it. i wonder what steve jobs thought about it when he used it for the first time. i bet he didn’t love it either and just thought it looked ”cool“. which it sorta does so there you go.
i have also installed bootcamp on the macbook and yes, windows xp. now that it is up and running it works just like an xp laptop when i am booted in windows and its a mac when running osx. installing boot camp was sort of a pain and here are the two most important things to realize when you are going to try to do it:
you must an installer cd with windows xp pro or home with service pack 2.
you cannot use the actual windows installer cd because it is too shiny for the cd drive in the macbook. it won’t work. at least it didn’t for me.
i had to make an exact copy of the windows installer cd onto a cd that was not shiny and then the install went off without a hitch.
now, my best windows machine is a mac. go figure.
more later. but a hint. i am going to install final cut pro studio and see what happens when i run it with the shared video memory. i bet it won’t make that much of a difference but we’ll see.
