John Hasson

My Sony 280 stopped thinking a battery was plugged into it. I checked into warranty/repair. It was $99 just to look at the thing and then anywhere from $249 to $749 to repair it. It looks like my middle child just got her first computer (It works fine plugged into the wall)

Vista disappointed me quite a bit. Windows XP works great, I like it. Now I could have just bought another laptop and downgraded it to XP (I did consider it); but I’ve been eying OSX more and more over the past few months. I did a lot of research and studying before I even went to the local Apple Store. I had a personal shopper showing me how to use the mac. He knew all the keyboard shortcuts, but when I asked him how you see how much memory is in use or where the terminal was he was at a loss. With his help (he showed me how to navigate the system, etc) I found the apps I was looking for. (Hint: Look in the Application/Utility folder)

So now I have a MacBook Pro with VMWare Fusion so I can run Visual Studio 2005 and all that for development (I haven’t found an IDE I like better then VS2005, if you know of one that is better then PLEASE tell me)

Things I like about it:

• Flash doesn’t crash Firefox anymore.
• The feel of the keyboard is the best I have found on a laptop
• It has a remote control for watching movies, etc
• I can use VMware’s Unity function to make my XP programs work in the OSX desktop

  

• Spaces (it isn’t as snazzy as Compiz but it is close enough)
• There is lots of software out there for macs, a heck of a lot more then I expected.
• Great batter life.
• All the eye candy… there is an amazing amount of things. No wonder noobs love apples.

Things I don’t like about it:

• Why are they selling me a service plan? Do they expect it to break?
• I could have gotten an Ubuntu or XP laptop for nearly half the price (not as much software either, but still…)
• Only comes in silver/grey, but it gave me an excuse to name it Bender. I wonder how many other Mac’s are named Bender for this very reason.
• Keyboard layout is a bit different then the one I was trained on by Microsoft, but it is usable and once I learn the different things like Fn+Delete and so on its not that bad. I still struggle with using End properly
• $700+ for 4Gigs of RAM!!!!!!!

So.. not to bad, so far I am happy. I’ll be expanding the ram with some cheaper non-apple ram and suffer through it.

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