Finally!!11

A

a ronin

Gawd
Joined
Jan 29, 2003
Messages
782
Hi, I just bought a MacBook Pro. Base model.

This thing is superb. Having played with it only a few times in the Apple store, it was very much a deprived and limited experience. The one thing that stands out to me is the audibility of the computer. It is dead silent. I swear you cannot tell if it's on or not. My enclosure with the drive inside was drowning out the thing.

At any rate, I'm not much of a review writer, but if there are questions people would like answered, I'll do my best to accommodate. That said, I'm having a hard time moving around OSX.

The speakers are nice as well. Very clear and robust for what they are. And glowing keys? whoa! Nice. Very nice.
 
first things would be to enable 2-finger scroll. Best option ever.

also, make that sucker noisy and get SMCFancontrol (control your fan speed so you can cool it down more)
 
That fan control is a lifesaver. The bottom of my Macbook is just warm now, instead of at "leg baking temp". And it's still pretty quiet too.
 
It has ran pretty cool for the first half hour on the factory charge. The battery LED indcator showed all except one.

The 2 finger scroll was enabled (afaik) out of the box, but my cursor speed is so latent and I'm just having a real difficult time configuring it.

I'm downloading Boot Camp right now so I can throw on some game to see how it performs.

Do you guys have any advice on how to make this even more user friendly? Admittedly, the years of Windows habit is inhibiting me from enjoying it more than I am. It'll hopefully come with time. Hopefully. (failed conversions are few and far in between, but they do happen).
 
Just think of how something is done in windows, and then do it the opposite. I'm kidding about that, mostly.

Something I use a lot more on my Mac than I ever did on my PC is keyboard shortcuts. "command + Q" "command + W" just make sense.
 
Remember most keyboard shortcuts involving ctrl are now facilitated using the Apple Key (ie Cut is now Apple+c, paste is Apple+v etc)

Also, if you have multiples windows open of the same application (say MSN messenger), to toggle through the windows of the same application, use Apple+~. If you wnat to toggle through applications, its Apple+tab (Apple+Shift+~ and Apple+Shift+tab reverse the cycle order).

All in all Mac OS X is a great OS. Also definitely try out the F9 - F12 keys, you'll like them :)
 
DaLurker said:
All in all Mac OS X is a great OS. Also definitely try out the F9 - F12 keys, you'll like them :)
Click to expand...

If you've got a backlit keyboard, which you do if you own a MacBook Pro, you'll have to use the "fn" key to override the backlight adjustment on the F9 and F10 keys. I use F11 all the time at work.
 
felix88 said:
If you've got a backlit keyboard, which you do if you own a MacBook Pro, you'll have to use the "fn" key to override the backlight adjustment on the F9 and F10 keys. I use F11 all the time at work.
Click to expand...

Or go to Key & Mouse preferences, Keyboard tab, and check "Use F1-F12 key to control software features...". This is one of the first things I enable.
 
KaosDG said:
first things would be to enable 2-finger scroll. Best option ever.
Click to expand...
Truth content: HIGH




Also, assign the bottom left corner to Exposé: Show all windows and the top right corner to Show Desktop. It's awesome.
 
The idea of hot zones or spots is cool. However, I'm use to the way of Konfabulator which was to assign the function to the F keys up top.

One thing I couldn't believe was how this thing can gobble up memory like crazy. I figured 1GB of memory would perform well. Certain tasks on my archaic Windows desktop perform faster. Does Apple install bloatware because I'm thinking of gutting the installation and see what I can do to improve speed. Adding another stick is not yet an option.

And the screen is not that bright. I was expecting it to be like my Dell 2407, but I wouldn't even say it's 25% that bright.
 
What kind of software are you running? Remember that anything run via Rosetta will consume much more RAM. Besides, I really think that 1 gig is a bit on the small side for a modern computer.



The cool thing about hot corners for Exposé, is drag-n-drop. Let's say you download something to the desktop. Poke the top right corner to reveal it. Grab it, and drag it into the lower left corner (or whatever corners you've set Exposé to), and pick another window. Drag-n-drop, with application switching, all without touching the keyboard. It's smooth.
 
Just for kicks do Command+Option+Control+8...

That one comes in really handy for some websites, like this one, actually, that have a bit too much contrast between the background color and the basic text color.

Hit it again to revert.

Also, I've owned 3 Macs of recent (less than the past 1.5 months) and all of them had the same 2GB of Patriot PC2-5300 DDR2 667 MHz sticks in them (2x1GB):

black MacBook (not the new C2D model); underperforming, the LCD is just too small, the DVD drive is a POS (multiple forums online about the problems with it, etc). Returned it less than a week after I got it.

Got a MacBook Pro (not the new C2D model either); same issues, although the LCD is a bit larger at 1440x900. The DVD drive is still crap, period, and again, multiple forums that will point those problems out. Never heard the "whine" or the "moo" issue that people complained about, and fixed the rather warm case stuff with the smcFanControl when it first appeared. Still wasn't enough to make me want to keep it.

Right now I'm on a 20" Core 2 Duo iMac - it's simply not performing as I might expect. When I boot into XP Pro installed natively using BootCamp 1.1.2, XP is just fast compared to OSX; XP is just snappier compared to OSX; XP is just lightning quick on most if not all operations I do under both OSes.

One test I use is a rip of a DVD. The entire process on Windows works like this:

Rip from the 18x Plextor FireWire drive using DVDDecrypter to the hard drive; crunch the resulting VIDEO_TS folder from DVD9 size to a DVD5 ISO using DVDShrink with the default settings after a deep analysis; burn the resulting ISO DVD5 on the 18x Plextor FireWire drive using a TDK 16x DVD+R blank using Nero 6.6.0.18.

Under OSX that process looks like this:

Rip from the 18x Plextor FireWire drive using Mac The Ripper (Intel Unibin/latest version .13e) to the hard drive; crunch the resulting VIDEO_TS folder from DVD9 size to a DVD5 IMG file using DETOX (DVD2OneX2 v2.1) using best quality/high settings; burn the resulting IMG file on the 18x Plextor FireWire drive using Toast 7.1 Universal.

Now before anyone asks, Plextor has a feature called "RipLock" that limits the DVD ripping speed to around 2.5x for error correction purposes (that's their statement, we all know it's to hamper DVD copying - there is a secondary reason I'll explain shortly). You *can* disable it using the PlexTools Professional software and going through all the settings to find the "SpeedRead" option and enabling that so the setting holds permanently unless you change it again.

The other method is to hold the Eject button on the front of the drive down for about 5 seconds. Doing so disables RipLock - you know it works when the LED flashes several times then stops. Release the button, the tray ejects waiting for a DVD to rip at full speed, which is actually around 12-13x max on DVD media. The kicker is as soon as you eject that one particular DVD, RipLock goes back into effect - hence the need to disable it permanently.

The downside to disabling it permanently is the drive spins up all the time when reading DVDs - so it's not very useful if you're actually watching a DVD movie because the drive is spinning pretty damned fast. So, I sometimes will disable RipLock for lengths of time, primarily when backing up DVDs but re-enable it using PlexTools Pro if I just want to watch a movie with the Wife. Having that drive spun up and vibrating the whole desk isn't a pleasant thing. :) (This, btw, is the secondary reason for RipLock - a quieter operating DVD drive)

Anyway, back to the results:

Under Windows, that process above on the "Antitrust" DVD that I own (dual layer original, clocks in at 7.62GB of files on the DVD itself), the entire process from the insertion of the DVD in the drive to it being a finished DVD5 burned backup spit out by Nero is 31 minutes and some odd seconds.

Under OSX, that same process above clocks in at around 39 minutes roughly. Doesn't seem like much, but it is slower. And that's not the only thing that's slower, too. Lots of stuff is.

I understand why so many people like OSX, really. I've been using it off and on since the summer of 2005 when the first leaks for Intel builds appeared (I'm guilty, sue me, but in the end I bought a Mac - 3 of 'em, actually, with the 4th one belonging to my Wife, another 20" C2D iMac she's keeping).

But it's slow compared to XP - and I won't even try to compare it to Vista since that's not officially out yet and isn't subject to this kind of testing so far. I'll probably sell this iMac of mine then look for a decent Core 2 Duo powered laptop of some kind.

Just for kicks I repeated the test above using XP under Parallels, inside of OSX. The full process was 34 minutes and some odd seconds. So XP running inside a virtual machine (thanks to Intel's VT-x support in the Core 2 Duo and Parallel's excellent use of it) still bested OSX running the same kind of overall process by several minutes.

Go figure.

I'm not bashing OSX, not in the slightest. It's a great OS overall, but it's underperforming by a wide margin in many respects compared to accomplishing the same tasks in XP - on the exact same machine, even.

YMMV, as always.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
So in other words, XP is faster, like I said.
Click to expand...

Uh, no.

Mactheripper is slow as dog poop.

edit: Also, this thread will NOT become an XP vs. Mac debate.

We know where those end up.
 
Actually, MTR was pulling in the data off the DVD as fast as DVDDecrypter was - about 7x at the beginning running up to just under 12x near the end of the ripping process so in terms of MTR vs DVDDecrypter, they were neck and neck.

Notice I said the Unibin version of MTR and not the old Rosetta version, also.

And as anyone that knows what they're talking about, you can't compare XP to a Mac - XP is an operating system, a Mac is a computer. It's not a valid comparison on any level.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Actually, MTR was pulling in the data off the DVD as fast as DVDDecrypter was - about 7x at the beginning running up to just under 12x near the end of the ripping process so in terms of MTR vs DVDDecrypter, they were neck and neck.

Notice I said the Unibin version of MTR and not the old Rosetta version, also.
Click to expand...



I don't care.

This debate stops now, or the posts get deleted.
 
a ronin said:
The idea of hot zones or spots is cool. However, I'm use to the way of Konfabulator which was to assign the function to the F keys up top.

One thing I couldn't believe was how this thing can gobble up memory like crazy. I figured 1GB of memory would perform well. Certain tasks on my archaic Windows desktop perform faster. Does Apple install bloatware because I'm thinking of gutting the installation and see what I can do to improve speed. Adding another stick is not yet an option.

And the screen is not that bright. I was expecting it to be like my Dell 2407, but I wouldn't even say it's 25% that bright.
Click to expand...

OS X handles memory differently than XP.

In XP when you exit a program anything stored on the memory that is associated with the program gets cleared for the most part.

In OSX when you exit a program some core files of the program remains stored on the RAM. There are many reasons for this. Have you quit out of a program and then running it again soon after? Notice how much faster it loads? (Try this with MS Word on an Intel Mac). The old data does get replace if an active program demands the space.
 
You should look into QuickSilver if you're down with using keyboard shortcuts. Pretty much indexes everything on your drive for easy access.

Example: Command + Space type in "fi" and it'll launch Firefox.
Then within Firefox, Command + Space type in "ha" and it'll launch Hardforums.

It just works.
 
bbz_Ghost said:
Just for kicks do Command+Option+Control+8...

But it's slow compared to XP - and I won't even try to compare it to Vista since that's not officially out yet and isn't subject to this kind of testing so far. I'll probably sell this iMac of mine then look for a decent Core 2 Duo powered laptop of some kind.
Click to expand...

I disagree.....I had a AMD X2 Dual core rig with a 7900gt and I switch to a macbook with 1gig of ram.....my macbook and OSX feel so much faster to use, turn on/off etc. OS X feels snappier to me than XP......

Anyway, theres a cool setting to enable screen zooming with the two finger scroll when holding down the option key.....its super cool
 
hungryduck said:
I disagree.....I had a AMD X2 Dual core rig with a 7900gt and I switch to a macbook with 1gig of ram.....my macbook and OSX feel so much faster to use, turn on/off etc. OS X feels snappier to me than XP......

Anyway, theres a cool setting to enable screen zooming with the two finger scroll when holding down the option key.....its super cool
Click to expand...
Agreed, comming from X2 3800+ to the computer in sig, much faster in my opinion.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top