Posts about hardware, software, or the tech industry itself
In computers, bugs are a fact of life. No matter how much someone might claim that an application or operating system is “perfect”, the truth is always quite different.
Take the Macintosh, for example. I’ve been using my MacBook Pro for a while, and am pretty impressed with its behavior. But “bug free? Heck no. Here are a few recent examples of “unexplained” behavior:
I like watching movies in my home. A nice big screen TV, comfy chairs, a DVR or DVD player…I can pause whenever I want, stretch my legs, rewind and re-watch scenes. It can be a better experience than what you get at many commercial theaters these days.
Continue reading Looking for a cool home theatre? Look no further…
I find the failure of a computer’s power supply to be one of the most difficult failures to diagnose. And earlier this week I had that perception reinforced.
The second computer in my office, the “guest” gaming PC, has become my wife Irene’s primary EverQuest II machine. It is built out of parts replaced by my most recent upgrades: basically, it is a two year old “bleeding edge” computer, which means it is still pretty decent for playing EverQuest.
A few weeks ago, Irene experienced a couple of odd events while using this machine. On one occasion when I was watching, the screen suddenly became “corrupted”, with garbage characters appearing amongst the graphics. A screen refresh cleaned things up. Then there was the “crackle” the machine emitted one day just before rebooting. I decided this week that it was time to give that computer some TLC.
My thinking initially was that the machine was probably a dust clogged nightmare. I could see globs of dusty fur sticking out of the drive bay, so I imagined discovering a huge mat of fur and dust inside. When I cracked the case, however, it actually wasn’t too bad: yes, it definitely needed cleaning, but the dust/hair build up had mostly been stopped from entering the chassis by the air filter on the case. The innards were in need of a few blasts of compressed air, and the corners of the case benefited from some vacuuming.
The whole cleaning process took an hour or two. When I reassembled everything and turned the box on, I got…nothing. No POST dialog, no Windows start up, no beeps. The fans started, the machine *seemed* to power up, but it didn’t seem to actually get into the boot process at all. My initial assumption was that dust was causing a short, or that I had damaged a component while performing the cleanup. But that wasn’t it….
Even though I’ve sipped the Apple Koolaid, I still really, really don’t get the iPhone mania.
I’ve been hearing about how the various instant messaging platforms are going to interoperate“any day now” for several years. But it always seems that the various players involved never quite get it together. Windows Messenger connects with Yahoo! Messenger, but not AIM. iChat connects with AIM, but not Messenger. Jabber connects with everything, but not enough people use it.
As anyone reading this blog knows, I bought a Macintosh recently. Heck, all I’ve written about during the last couple of weeks has been my MacBook Pro. I am pretty happy with my new computer, but I’m the first to admit that a Macintosh isn’t exactly an economical alternative to a PC.
I can never leave well enough alone. If 2 GB of RAM in my MacBook Pro is good, 4 GB of RAM would be better, right? Well, as a matter of fact, yes. So I set out to expand the memory of my new Macintosh, and have a few tidbits to share.
Can your MacBook Pro be expanded?
As I understand it, there have been a total of two “releases” of Intel-based MacBook Pro. The first came out late in 2006 and was in distribution until approximately June of 2007. That version used a version of the Intel chipset that, for reasons that remain unclear to me, could only address 3 GB of RAM. Note that you could *install* 4 GB, but that the machine itself wouldn’t actually use the memory above the 3 GB boundary due to mapping conflicts. I believe this first version of the MacBook Pro came with 1 GB of RAM standard.
Apple quietly updated the MacBook Pro during the June time frame of 2007. The new models use the Intel “Santa Rosa” chipset, and can now support up to 4 GB of RAM. These newer MacBook Pros come standard with 2 GB of RAM, with of the two slots in the machine filled (I.E.: two 1 GB SODIMM chips).
I’ve had my MacBook Pro for a week now, thought it would be a good time to share some pictures. Here she is:
This picture was taken the very first time I powered the machine on, after it had completed its initial setup. The machine came pre-installed with OSX 10.4.10: the last version of OSX before Leopard. I got a "free" upgrade to Leopard (just had to pay shipping and handling), and it arrived here yesterday. Here’s how the Mac looks now with Leopard installed…
I mentioned earlier that I had installed VMWare Fusion on my MacBook. One of my objectives with this was to be able to run Windows Live Writer on my Macintosh for editing this blog.
You might rightly point out that there are plenty of blog editors for the Macintosh, some of them reasonably good. However…I’ve tried several of them, and they don’t work quite as well for my purposes as Live Writer does. So…how did things go?
Everyone knows, of course, that you can run Windows applications on a Macintosh. When Macs started shipping with Intel processors this became almost a no brainer. Boot Camp is the most obvious way to achieve the “Windows on a Mac” experience, but is a bit of a brute force approach: when you boot your machine, it is either a Macintosh or a Windows based system, not both at the same time.