Phil’s Blog

My New Mac Book Pro

Add comment November 8th, 2006

I’ve had my new 15″ 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo Mac Book Pro now for a couple of days. I really do love the thing. It only took a couple of hours to get it out of the box and get all of my iTunes, Mail, iPhoto, Documents and such transfered over. It probably didn’t need to take that long but I didn’t use the Migration Assistant that probably would have done it in a few minutes. I kinda liked the idea of having a clean start so I just copied what I needed.

I have Windblows XP running on a VM in Parallels. This is something I must do for work, otherwise I wouldn’t bother. It runs faster than many of the PC’s around here. It’s so much faster than my Virtual PC / Windows 2000 combination that I had on my G4 PowerBook that a comparison can’t really be made. It’s like not running it in a VM at all. It runs so fast it feels like it’s native. I guess I can see why somebody would want to run BootCamp but I don’t. I’d prefer for Windows to stay where it belongs; Inside another window.

The only complaint that I have about Parallels is the way the serial port is handled. In VPC I could assign one of the actual Mac serial ports to the virtual com ports in VPC. In parallels the best I can see is assigning it to a socket. There may be a way to get this to work but I haven’t fought with it too much. Since the MBP doesn’t have a com port on it anyway, it has to be USB so I just loaded the USB drivers into the XP VM and it worked okay. I liked the VPC way of doing it because I always had better luck getting USB -> Serial devices to work in OS X than Win2k. I did manange to get an RS-232 converter and an RS-485 converter both working yesterday and got all the Modbus work done that I needed.

The battery life on the MBP seems to be comparable to the old PowerBook. It does run considerably faster. I played around with some iMovie stuff yesterday and compressing video was quite a bit faster than on the old G4. I like the screen, I’m still torn on the keyboard. I loved the keyboard on my PowerBook as soon as I touched it, and this one is close enough to not be an issue but I don’t know if I like the new texture. They are both better than any cheesy Dell keyboard.
The remote seems rather pointless. I can see it’s usefullness on a Mac Mini but I doubt that I’ll use it much with my MBP. It works well it just doesn’t have any use for me. The iSight camera works well but again I don’t see the point. I just really don’t want to do any video conferencing. Maybe I’ll find a use for it now that I have it but I never had a need to go out and buy one.

The power brick is quite a bit bigger and I guess that is to be expected, because the battery is bigger. I guess I’ll get used to it. I love the little magnetic power adapter. It seems like it holds on a little too tight but it’s really cool how it goes in without any help. You just get it close and “click” you have power.

I like that it has the two USB ports split between each side. I was always having to install a USB hub on my PowerBook because the ports were so close that some flash drives and other peripherals couldn’t both be installed. This way I can pick which side to plug the devices into as well.

I don’t think that I like the Superdrive being on the front as much as I liked it being on the side. When the computer is in my lap it seems a little clumsy but this is minor and moving it to the front allowed for the USB port to be on that side and so it was worth doing as far as I’m concerned.

To sum up, you’ll get my MBP from me when you pry it out of my cold dead hands.  The screen is very bright and crisp, it’s fairlly light, it’s very small.  It’s blazing fast, and has plenty of RAM and HD space.  It’s a Mac so it’s better than any Windblows computer anyway.  Now I just have to look forward to Leopard.

Windows Vista

Add comment May 30th, 2006

Today (for some unknown reason) I decided to take a look at Micro$oft’s Vista page and see what all the hoopla is on this perpetual marketing drive known as Windows. It seems that they have copied a lot of the Mac OS X Tiger features. What are known as Widgets in OSX are Gadgets in Vista. The fancy new search feature in Vista is called Spotlight in Tiger, and we’ll see if it works as well.

The part I really liked in the Vista Hype was the security tab. Here are a few quotes…

Microsoft believes the best approach to stopping malware is to layer security features.

This is just a fancy way of saying… “We don’t have time to fix the low level problems with our operating system so we are throwing a bunch of band-aids at them.” Didn’t Microsoft invent most of the ‘features’ that malware writers exploit?

In addition to using these built-in Windows Vista features, you should help keep your computer healthy by using antivirus software such as Windows OneCare or an antivirus solution from one of Microsoft’s partners. Whichever option you choose, remember to update your antivirus software regularly. These updates are generally available through a subscription from your antivirus vendor.

Microsoft’s solution for everything, “buy something else.” It’s often thought that Macs are more expensive than PC’s. Once you buy the spyware scanner, the virus blocker, the disk utility package and all the other little things that seem necessary under Windows, my PowerBook was a pretty good deal.

I really enjoyed the Networking section too.  Other than a few improvements in Wireless networking (most notable being the introduction of WPA2) there was nothing about making computers actually talk to each other.  It was all about drawing pretty pictures of all the problems that your Windows computer is having talking to other Windows computers.  All the while my Mac is talking to all of your Windows computers and printers (plus the Novell, and Linux boxes) that your Vista machine can’t seem to get working, but now you know why, because you can see the picture of the other computers with their little red ‘X’s on them.

Getting Things Started

Add comment May 17th, 2006

I just installed this blogging software (Wordpress) onto my web server. I have never really used a ‘blog before but I decided to give it a try.

I suspect that I’ll spend a lot of time on these pages commenting on the days events. I’m sure that I’ll do a fair amount of talking about airplanes. There will be the occasional debunk of the latest free energy ideas. Knowing me, there’ll be a lot of controversy over this whole universe-happening-by-accident stupidty known as evolution.

I promise that there will be no talk about Hollywood or who was that last to leave on Survivor. I couldn’t care less who Tom Cruise is married to or what his kids names are.