Wednesday, August 29, 2007

I, too, made the switch to a MacBook Pro

... and I'm never going back! I just got a ThinkPad T60p (2.0 GHz Core Duo, 160GB drive, 4GB RAM) in April, and I "upgraded" it to Vista, and it finally pushed me over the edge. I think Vista can (and will) be used effectively in the enterprise, but too many applications don't yet fully support it. And even among those that do, there are some problems that aren't being fixed (e.g. Picasa and Java applets consistently caused my display driver to crash). So I just got tired of having to depend on MS Vista.

So I got the smaller Macbook Pro with a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, 160 GB drive, and 4GB of RAM. The whole experience looks, feels, and functions nicely. The specific things I've noticed and like:

1. I copied my FireFox profile folder from Windows, and EVERYTHING just works - all of my plugins, my history, etc. And it works faster than it did under Vista (or XP, for that matter).

2. It resumes from sleep mode almost immediately. With Vista and XP, it never woke up as quickly - sometimes it woke up "not so slowly", but other times it would take several minutes.

3. I installed VMWare fusion, and it's just crazy fast. Suspending a VM (running XP, ironically) with 512MB of RAM assigned to it only takes 30 seconds. Resuming that same VM takes SECONDS - it's really almost immediate.

4. The USB ports transfer data at higher speeds. I plugged a thumb drive into the T60 and copied a file that took minutes. I then plugged the same drive into the Mac, and copying the same file took SECONDS. Don't know or care why this is - I'm just happy as hell that it works better now.

5. Configuring wireless connections is easy, and it just works.

6. On the down side, I have a Treo 700w on Verizon's network, and I love it. However, there is currently no way to tether this phone with OS X. This is the reason I have the XP VM installed - I can run PDANet in this XP VM to connect to Verizon's network, then just route the Mac's traffic through that connection.

That's all I've got for now - I'm having no problems at all, and I'm happy as can be with OSX.

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