Tuesday, May 23, 2006

Mac Book Pro startup key combos

Useful list of key combinations to press for various macintel boot-time behaviours.

Mac Book Pro wierdness

I've been using my 17" mac book pro for a week or so now. Golly, it's fast. None of the whining or noise or heat problems that the 15" mac book pro users have been complaining about on various blogs. I have no idea if it has the thermal grease issue that's been reported everywhere; it does get hotter than the powerbook G4. But not uncomfortably so.

Firewire 800 is marginally slower than the Firewire 800 on my Powerbook G4, but only marginally slower - it's much faster than Firewire 400! And having a dual-core CPU in a laptop is a dream come true. Going back to the G4 powerbook is painful.

I have only one complaint.

The machine locks up hard when trying to install JProfiler or Starry Night Enthusiast. I thought it might be a java issue, since the JProfiler installer works until it tries to detect a JVM, but IntelliJ IDEA installed and works flawlessly.

At some point, I'll have to nuke the Tiger installation on the box and reinstall, and see if this occurs on a clean OS installation.

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

From Shanghai, to Anchorage, to Minneapolis!

FedEx says my 17" Mac Book Pro will be here friday. It's in anchorage as I write, having arrived there this afternoon from Shanghai.

Hope they're right. My 17" Powerbook seems to get slower every day.