I’ve been saving up for a couple of years for a replacement laptop for my poor, old, busted eMachines m5310. The eMachine still runs, but it’s falling apart at the seams. There are cracks through the plastic, everything is a little wobbly, and half of the hinge has locked up and broken. Oh yeah, and the battery is dead. Other than that, it runs like a champ. It has issues starting up on the first try (a motherboard problem since I had it replaced), but that’s a quick fix, too. However, it was time to retire it a long, long time ago.
Once the eMachine started falling apart on me, I got a Toshiba Satellite laptop from work. It had a little 13″ display that was just too tiny for me to use. I felt so cramped, that even web browsing was uncomfortable. Much less actually trying to use it to do work or anything.
So, I gradually saved up for about 2-2.5 years, putting away a little bit at a time to save up for a new laptop. At the time, I wasn’t sure what. However, after seeing how well MacBook Pros have faired in the hands of many friends, I decided that I wanted one. In August, I had finally saved up enough money to get the basic MacBook Pro (MBP) without any upgrades. Upon researching, I discovered that there were solid rumors circulating that Apple might be doing updates to the MBP line in September. And I waited. September came and nothing happened for the MBP line. The next speculation was for October. I decided to hold out a little longer, lest I be saddened by something ultra-cool hitting the shelves and I jumped on it too early.
October came, and sure enough, there was a major update to the MBP. All new case fab from a single “brick” of aluminum, a button-less glass trackpad, bigger hard drive, DDR3 RAM, dual-video chipset, etc. As soon as the product announcement ended, I hit the Apple.com store and bought one. I got the 15.4″ 2.4 GHz model, upgraded to a 320GB hard drive, added iWork ‘08, and got an AppleCare protection plan. With an education discount, the total came out to around $2,500. I hit up Crucial and ordered a 4GB DDR3 memory kit to upgrade the RAM as well. Looking back on it, I wish I had just done the RAM upgrade through Apple. There wasn’t much of a price difference, and it would have saved the hassle of having to open the laptop up and upgrade the RAM.
When I finally received my laptop after about one and a half weeks, I couldn’t wait to abuse it. But, with Mac OS X, there’s not much to abuse. I installed FireFox, Darwine (for what it’s worth), and snagged CodeWeaver’s stuff when they were giving it away. I tried several times to get an install of Windows XP SP2 running in Bootcamp, and finally succeeded on my 7th try. I don’t know why it was so hard, but it finally worked that last try. I thought I’d use Bootcamp for on-the-go gaming with the fancy nVidia 9600M 256MB video card. So far, all I’ve really used Bootcamp for is Quicken. So far, it feels like a waste. I installed VMware Fusion 2 to be able to access my Bootcamp partition from within OS X. That way I don’t have to reboot every time I want to run Quicken. Lately, I have been second-guessing that and am tempted to install a very minimal Windows XP virtual machine setup just for Quicken. VMware won’t let you suspend your Basecamp partition since it could be booted by the machine. Suspending a virtual machine would probably be much faster than waiting every time for the Bootcamp machine to boot up and shut down every time I use Quicken.
So far, I’ve really only used my expensive new toy for Quicken and web browsing. I have great apps like iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, Keynote, Garage Band, and, yes, Photo Booth awaiting to unlock my creative potential, but I have nothing I want to use them for. I don’t take pictures enough to want to put together a fancy slideshow movie, and I rarely, if ever, make movies. What do I do with all this creative potential and no creative juices?!
There are only two things that really drive me nuts about my new toy. The first one is the almost razor-sharp aluminum edge on the front of the case where my arms wrest that starts to scratch and chafe after extensive typing (such as this blog post). The second one is my complete inability to find decent, free software. For Windows, I can find just about anything I want to do for free pretty easily. For Mac, it seems like everything costs money. I figure this is because everyone is jumping on the Mac craze bandwagon and hitting the emerging Mac market. Maybe it’s still too early for a lot of the quality stuff to hit the open-source/freeware platform just yet. I mean, these things are really expensive and buying one just to spend time and effort to build and give away free stuff seems daunting.
I guess I’m getting along with “the switch” fairly well. I’m on the lookout for any good freeware simple graphics apps (like Paint.net). I’d like to find a freeware Zend-clone if one exists. And may take advantage of MacFuse. Any tips or tricks anyone could pass along would be helpful. And, no, I don’t want the Gimp.
