Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Observations: Day two with my Macbook

Day two with my Macbook has come and gone. I brought it into work yesterday, mainly to show my coworker John. However, just my luck, I forgot he's out for the week training at a client site. I sent him an e-mail and he said he was bummed out and asked me to bring it in on Monday. So I said I would. I should have a nice case by then anyway.

Things are going well and I'm find it easy to move my files over from my desktop PC. I picked up a firewire cable yesterday which made moving my filed SO MUCH FASTER. I wish I had firewire on my desktop, but it's kind of old, because movingfiles from it to my external backup drive used to take forever. Fortunatly, my backdrive has firewire. So, moving that stuff to the Macbook has taken just minutes instead of over an hour. Bebe, who has a firewire port on her Dell, had no idea it was that much faster either, so she'll be using it to backup her stuff as well.

I'm almost out of HD space on the Macbook. This is mainly due to my music collection. The standard HD on a Macbook is 60gig, not small but not big either. Unfortunatly, I have a decent sized music collection and I like to rip my songs at a high bit rate, so my collection is about 50% bigger than it could be. I've got about 10 gigs left to spare, which actually would be okay if not for what I plan to do in the next week or two.

You see, I'm going to get a program called Parallels that allows me to run XP virtually on the Macbook. I could use something Apple provides called Bootcamp to run XP natively, but I'd prefer to not have to shut down and reboot each time I need to use XP. Anyway, back to what I was saying, to do this seriously, I'm going to need a bigger HD that I can partition for XP to use. the 10 gig I have left wouldn't cut it for that. To get around this issue I ordered a 120gig HD notebook HD which should get here later this week.

The people on the Macworld message board gave me a cool program that allows me to make a copy of my Mac to an external HD, or secondary drive, and then simply move that copy back over when I put in a new HD. Talk about nice. While I'll have to put OSX on the new HD once installed, restoring the copy will put back all my programs, files, setting, and everything else just the way it was before the new HD was put in. I'm going to look at this a bit more this weekend when I move the stuff over.

Other than that I'm just trying to get the hang on OSX, which has been pretty easy to pick up on. Stuff that takes 5 steps in XP takes like 2 in OSX. The interface is great as well, just much more pleasant to use than XP. I look forward to putting some more RAM in it in a few more weeks. It's only for 512MB right now, which does okay, but I'd lie to max it out at 2gig. That will set me back around 150-200 bucks or so, depending on where I get it. I figure I'll put 100 bucks aside this payday, and another 100 next payday, then i'm good to go.

One last thing...which I didn't know, OSX boots up faster each time. Evidently, OSX constantly moves the files you need more when you boot up to the parts of the drive it can get to quickest, or something like that. So basically, after about 5-7 of your first boots, each time after that it will get incrementally faster for the next 15-20 boots. After that the improvements trail off until that aren't noticiable anymore. I went from booting in about 30 seconds at first (which has me freaking out) to about 13 seconds now, which is amazing.

Have a good one.

-Steve

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