Tag Archive for 'MacBook'

Birmingham. It’s a Love/Hate Thing. Oh, and Michael McIntyre FTW!

Published on 1 December, 2009. Closed Tags: Apple, awesome, Birmingham, Birmingham Sucks, Bullring, Cold, Comedy, Event, Fail, Fantastic, Flu, M6, MacBook, Michael McIntyre, NIA, Repair, Sick, Traffic.

Ah, Birmingham. Some people love it, some people hate it. Personally, I both love and hate it. I love the fact that it has a nice cinema, an IMAX, a pretty nice shopping centre, an Apple Store, two nice big arenas, and so on, but I hate the fact that, outside of that, it’s a ugly dump of a city. Seriously, outside the recent development, there’s nothing remotely making me want to live there, or even drive though it. AT ALL.

MacBook.

Anyway, enough of that. So, on Monday the 16th of November, on the exact day that my warranty expired, I decided to finally get my MacBook fixed. Yeah, this is the problem I had. It took me a whole year to get it fixed. Honestly, the problem was there, and it was bugging me, but I just seemed to live with it for the year until the last minute – it’s safe to say that it’s now all fixed, and the keyboard is nice and matte again (it had turned shiny from one year of use), and of coursed, fixed.

The problem is that when I went on the 16th, two days later, I got a cold – most likely because I went into Birmingham in the freezing wind with not much on at all. T-shirt and a hoodie, that’s it. So it’s my fault. I had a sore throat/nose, but I was in bed (and, er, on the computer when mum wasn’t looking ) for about a week. Anyway, I was up and about from the 25th Nov again, and only now do I feel almost 100%. I’m still coughing slightly but for the most part I feel fine.

MIIIIIIIICHAEL MCINTYREEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Take two. I had planned to go before (see here), but my dad actually broke his leg in August, so sadly we (we = me and parents) had to cut short the whole journey and not go. However, I got some more tickets for the 30th Nov (which is technically yesterday) and saw him then, but at the National Indoor Arena in Birmingham instead of the O2. End result? Awesome. Funny as ever and it was great seeing him live. If he ever goes on tour again (and I presume he will), I’ll be going again for sure.

Oh yeah, and here are some videos. Enjoy: http://twitvid.com/1A465 (the arena), http://twitvid.com/19BE6 (comedy), and http://twitvid.com/98EBC (moar comedy).

The Journey Home? Not so much.

We (we = myself and mum) decided to go by car instead of the train as, well, it’s easier (and last time I went to the NIA, for Cirque Du Soleil, it was actually pretty much dead quiet when we came out). Or so I thought. Half the problem is that by train, there’s a one mile or so walk to the arena, and in the freezing wind, it’s bloody cold. Plus it’s Birmingham so we wouldn’t have made it back to the train anyway, due to stabbing.

Right, so, car journey down was okay. Not brilliant – I mean, the M6, at 6pm, on a weekday, yeah, there’s bound to be some traffic, and there was. It wasn’t too bad though – about a ten minute delay in total. And I managed to botch up the TomTom’s directions a little. All in all, though, that was fine. So, we went in, saw Mr McIntyre, and because our seats were in block 11 in the arena, we made it out and to the car within about 5 minutes of the end of the show. Perfect. So, we back out the bay parking bay, drive around the corner (we were on the roof of the parking garage), and end up behind a queue of cars. For an hour. Yes, an HOUR. I managed to listen to Robbie Williams’ entire new album in the car. One song after that, and we were finally out. It turns out they decided to empty the entire car park, level by level, before we managed to get out of it all. Lovely. Anyway, as soon as we were out, it was fine, until about 5 minutes later when we hit the rest of the traffic. Oh boy.

So, 45 minutes later and we finally were on the M6 and doing more than 40mph. Half the problem with the traffic jam is that the idiot roadworkers decided to close off half of the “expressway” between the central Birmingham area and the M6, for roadworks (At 11pm? At least wait until midnight!), so we had to go around the long route. Anyway, once we were on the last stretch of the expressway to the M6, it was fine…and then we arrived at the M6. Europe’s busiest motorway. Oh, yeah, and due to roadworks, they had turned it into a one lane road travelling at a whopping 10mph. Amazingly enough, they were ACTUALLY THERE, and ACTUALLY WORKING. I almost fainted. Yet, alas, only about 300 meters worth of roadworks required (I counted) 14 miles of motorway to be slowed down to 50mph, and have cones and warning signs and so on all the way along it. What the hell for? As Jeremy Clarkson said on Top Gear this past weekend, surely the point of dropping the limit to 50 is to protect the workforce? What workforce? Why not put the speed limit back up to 70 when they’re not there (so…all the time).

Anyway, that’s enough ranting. End of the day, Michael McIntyre was brilliant and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Also, note to self: take the train next time.

OS X isn’t some super epic OS, you know…

Published on 24 October, 2009. Closed Tags: Computer, Mac, MacBook, Operating System, OS, OS X, OSX, PC, Snow Leopard.

“You never have to reinstall OS X!!!11!1!1!!!!1111!1oneone!1″

Well, no. You don’t. But a fresh install of an OS is always a nice thing. For example – I reinstalled Snow Leopard on my MacBook last night, and have almost finished installing everything – I just have to install three things now, Photoshop CS4, Toast Titanium and World of Goo. With all my other apps installed so far, OS X is sitting at a pretty tiny 9.26GB. Once I install those three apps, it should bump up to about 15GB used space, tops.

Before I reinstalled Snow Leopard – and with the exact same apps, data, and so on, on the HDD, OS X was taking up just over 35GB. That’s with 11 months of constant use, and what was originally Leopard installed.

So yes, sure, Snow Leopard was running pretty smoothly before I reinstalled, but now it’s running even better. Actually, the one thing I have noticed is that now it only takes about 25 seconds to reboot, from the time I hit “Reboot” to the time it was at the desktop, with everything loaded – before, it used to take about 60 seconds.

Next up, reinstalling Windows 7 with the retail version this coming week.

MacBook Issues

Published on 18 November, 2008. View Comments Tags: Apple, BSOD, Issue, Kernel Panic, Keyboard, MacBook, Problem.

Up until last week, I had been running Windows XP in a virtual machine, using VMware Fusion, on my iMac, and then, when I got it, my MacBook. However, on Friday, the virtual machine just suddenly gave me a BSOD (OS X itself remained fine though).

Before I go on, some people have asked me why I run a Windows virtual machine on my MacBook. The reason I do it is because I still can’t find OS X alternates for mIRC and Microsoft Visio that I like, and other programs I use, such as mkv2vob, are Windows only. Plus, I keep it running because several people I know are *only* on Steam and/or Xfire for IM. Crazy, I know, I use WLM, YIM, AIM, GTalk, Jabber, MobileMe, and Facebook for IM, and yet a small handful of people still only want to use Steam and Xfire for IM. Oh well.

Anyway, I wasn’t doing anything amazing just then, just mIRC and Steam. That was it. So, I rebooted the virtual machine itself, and that worked fine. Until about 60 minutes later, when OS X itself decided to kernel panic (which looks something like this). And it kept doing it over and over again, even with VMware completely closed. So, I decided to try a reinstall of OS X, and started backing up all my stuff off the HDD. However, by the time I was almost done, I’d had several crashes, and by Saturday night my MacBook refused, outright, to boot up.

If I pressed the power button, it would turn itself on, but the screen didn’t turn on at all. I tried all the suggestions on the Apple support site, including clearing the NVRAM or whatever it was called, I tried booting up in “safe mode”, tried booting to the Apple Hardware Test (this requires the OS X install DVD, which my MacBook decided to eat and not give back, too)…nothing worked! So, I decided to go to the Apple Store where I had got it, at the Bullring in Birmimgham (this was on Sunday). The guy who helped was very friendly, however all the Apple Geniuses were booked for that day, so he said I’d have to come back another day, or, if I wanted, he could swap the machine on the spot for a new one. I chose to do that, but, I took it back home first, plugged the HDD into my old iMac, and got all the remaining files off the HDD first. Took it back on Monday, and they swapped it out for a brand new MacBook, all in about 10 minutes. Easy.

Brought it home, and installed all my apps again, copied all my music to the HDD, and this time, I’m not running Windows XP in a virtual machine. I’ve decided to just use Linkinus for IRC, and if I do need Visio, Steam, Xfire, or mkv2vob, I’ll use my old Vaio laptop for those.

So far, so good. Except for one thing. On the now dead MacBook, I had one issue with the keyboard, and one issue only – the F keys at the top were all slanted slightly to the left. Other people have had the same issue too. There’s a discussion on the Apple support forum too, somewhere, about the same issue. However, I can live with that. What I can’t live with, however, is that on this new MacBook, both the N and M keys keep coming loose. And the O key squeaks against the aluminum.

Now, in no way do I type roughly, I think my typing could be considered “moderate”. I don’t type “super lightly”, but I don’t hit the keys hard either. However, after just 4 hours or so with this replacement, the O key sqeaks (the top of it is rubbing against the aluminum unibody), and the N and M keys, if I type quickly, keep coming loose. This is extremely annoying, as I type fast, all the time. While typing this blog post alone, the keys have popped up about 20-30 times! The easiest way to explain this is that if I type something, and my finger hits either key and slides even slightly to the left, the key pops up! Here’s a pic of them both popped up:

The only way I can seem to get around this is to type slowly (which is annoying), or to not use the N or M keys at all (which is just stupid). It’s easy to fix, all I have to do is push them down again. But doing that over and over and over again is EXTREMELY annoying. And, because Apple class the keyboard as part of the whole unibody, if I get it fixed they’ll probably insist on giving me another replacement. Great. This is also annoying because every time I go to the Apple store, it costs £8.30 in train fares to go from Stafford to Birmingham New Street.

Hopefully though, they can somehow replace the individual key itself (because I think the two clips on the bottom-right of they keys has broken or something). Regardless, I’m going to forward a link to this post to the boffins there, and, HOPEFULLY, they can post me the two keys so I can maybe try and replace them myself. Please, Apple?

I also don’t seem to be having much luck recently. First my PS3 dies last month, and now this. What next?

Swap!

Published on 10 November, 2008. View Comments Tags: Apple, Dell, HDD, iMac, LCD, MacBook, NAS, PC, Sky HD, Thecus, TV.

Last month, I swapped my iMac for one of Apple’s new aluminium MacBooks. I’m pretty happy with it overall.

This month, I’m swapping my Dell 2407WFP-HC monitor for a Sony Bravia LCD TV – the KDL32V4000. Reason being, I originally purchased the Dell as my main monitor back when I had a PC, and I used it for that, but on both my iMac and MacBook I wasn’t actually using it for all that much other then IRC and the few movies I used to watch while I browsed the web. So, since I’m getting Sky HD installed next month, I thought “what the hell”, put it on eBay (for £260), and I’m swapping it for the TV. Considering I was going to use it all the time with Sky anyway, and 1080p is kindof wasted for Sky, I think it’s worth it. Only issue is, I need to reshuffle my room around a bit to fit it in somewhere.

Sometime this month I’m also going to put my Thecus NAS on eBay – unless anyone wants it now (for £220). Reason? I’m running out of space on it (it only has 1.56TB of space), and if I sell it, I can get two 1TB Western Digital MyBooks, which also have the advantages of 1) being quiet (the fan in the Thecus is noisy, to my ears anyway), 2) more HDD space, and 3) it’s USB, so I can bypass OS X’s network file sharing, which, honestly, is horrific compared to Windows. Plus, with USB HDDs, I can swap / add to them more easily.

Almost a week with the new MacBook

Published on 30 October, 2008. View Comments Tags: Aluminum, Apple, Computer, Laptop, MacBook, New, PC.

On Saturday the 25th of October, I took a train ride down to Birmingham New Street to pick up the new Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook, from the Apple Store in the Bullring. As always, upon going into the Apple store I was greeted by one of Apple’s staff, and asked if I needed any assistance, so I said yes, and asked for the new MacBook. 10 minutes later, I walked out the store with a rather heavy box containing the MacBook, and a Mini DisplayPort to DVI adaptor (which was £20 – ouch!).

Itching to open it, I arrived home, took it out the box, took a few photos, and turned it on. Instantly, I was greeted by the Apple setup wizard on the lovely bright display. I must say, after using this for a week, I’m very happy with it. It’s a much better display then any other laptop I’ve had, however, it does still fail to display blacks as vividly as the iMac did, or my Dell 2407WFP-HC does. In fact, overall, it seems a little off on several colours, but it’s not that bad – I’ve gotten used to it so far. If you’re seriously into graphic design, get the Pro. But if you just use it as a general day-to-day machine, it’s fine.

The design of the notebook itself is fantastic. The curvy edges when it’s closed make it feel thinner then it is, and the whole notebook feels very strong – much stronger then the old Vaio laptop that I’ve had (but not used for the past two years+). Whereas the Vaio felt like the screen was going to snap at any moment, the MacBook feels nice and strong. The overall design is nice too, I like having all the ports on the one side (and it’s the left, too – I hate it when the ports are on the right side, where I usually put a mouse and mousepad). However, I do have one complaint so far. When I’m typing, if I put my wrists on the edge of the laptop, the edge is actually pretty sharp – you don’t notice it if you have a jumper on or anything but if you’re just wearing a T-Shirt or something, and your wrists / arm are rubbing against the edge, I can imagine it would get irrating after a while. However, it hasn’t annoyed me that much yet.

In terms of the software, well, it’s OS X. Same as using my iMac. No real difference there, apart from the speed. Dropping down from my iMac’s 2.8GHz to the MacBook’s 2.4GHz isn’t that noticable – Photoshop and H264 HD video playback seems slightly slower, but not that much – both are still perfectly usable. Again, I think Photoshop would be much better with 4GB of RAM, versus 2GB. However, that’s another topic for another day.

Another thing that I love about the hardware itself, which is a very small feature, but it’s great nonetheless – if you plug the iPhone earphones into the audio out jack, you can use them for audio, but, and here’s the good part – you can use the microphone, too! I’ve been using it for the past week with Skype (calling my dad, in the Netherlands), and it’s pretty much perfect to replace my large and bulky headphones – the audio quality, according to him, is very good. As for the built in speakers, they’re very very good for a laptop, some of the best I’ve heard, but, of course, I’ll stick to using my speakers for music. They sound a hell of a lot better.

I’ve not yet installed XP on here to play any games yet, but I plan on doing so in the next week or so.

Now – the bad points. So far, I have a few issues.

Firstly, the trackpad is great, it’s huge, it feels good to use, however, it’s loud if you click. Seriously, if you’re in a quite place, like a library, and you click, I’m guessing everyone would look up and stare at you. The trackpad is just loud.

Secondly, and this seems to have been reported by other people – the function keys seem to all be slightly tilted to one side – the left is lower, and the right is raised.

Finally – and this one annoys me a lot – well, take a read for yourself: Apple Support – Discussions (I know it says MBP and the Cinema Display, but it’s happening to me too, on my 2407WFP-HC).

Other then those few issues, I think it’s been well worth switching from the iMac, and I’m very happy with my purchase. I just hope Apple can fix the issue I’ve been having with the external monitor issue, and soon, because it’s annoying.

I think that covers everything.