MacBook Pro battery

I have had my MacBook Pro for just over 2 years now (2 years and about 3 months) and I just started getting a warning sign for my battery. I went to the apple store and they told me that my battery had expired. It has had its 300 charge cycles and needs to be replaced.

Now don't get me wrong I am very happy with my MacBook Pro and based on my experience 2 years is about right for a laptop battery. This is my laptop and I'm not planning on replacing it until June/July next year (I'm on a minimum of a 3 year replacement cycle). I see no need to replace my MacBook Pro right now I have a 2.4Gh Core 2 Duo processor with 4Gb of RAM and nice as the new MacBook Pros are, they aren't enough better; maybe when quad core ones come along.

So I have to ask myself do I spend £97 on a new battery now, or do I wait. So far although the apple store says my battery is at 60% of capacity and needs replacing I can still get 1-2 hours of usage from it, which is good enough for me generally. So right now I wont be buying a replacement battery. I'm guessing in 9 months time I may reconsider and if the quad core MacBook Pros are out I may go for a replacement computer, otherwise I guess I'll be buying a new battery then.

Alasdair

Snow Leopard experiences

So I've been using Snow Leopard for a while now, so I thought I would detail some first impressions. First the good things:

1. Cisco VPN support built in. The Cisco VPN client on the mac caused me many problems, and frequently caused kernel panics. Snow Leopard has a built in client so I've uninstalled the Cisco software and my system is far more stable.
2. It is smaller. I got hard drive space back. This is great.
3. Faster. It feels much more responsive.

There are some things I want to try out, but haven't had a chance to. I have a mac and an iPhone and keeping my email, contacts and calendar in synch is not as easy as I would like. Snow Leopard has added Microsoft Active Sync support, and the iPhone has it, so I want to try that out and see if I get a better solution. The only problem is that I need to get an email provider that has ActiveSync.

Finally the not so good:

1. Wireless is less reliable. I turn my wireless network off when I'm not using it. If my mac is turned on when I turn the wireless network on then it doesn't pick up the wireless network. I suspect this might be related to my wireless network not broadcasting its network name, but it is still not good.
2. 1Password does not work with Safari 4 very well. I have it working now (I had to make Safari 4 run in 32-bit mode), but each 1Password update has a habit of breaking things

So generally I'm very happy, other than a few minor niggles

Thanks
Alasdair

AppleCare, well not the environment at least

As my collegues at work know I have a MacBook Pro and I love it. I will have had it for one year on July 11th, and given how much I use it I decided to buy an AppleCare warrenty.

Usually I would not buy an extended warrenty, but I read up about the Apple one and I heard very good things about it, and since my old iBook went in twice (at my expense) for work I decided to go for it.

So I went to the apple website to buy the warrenty and I placed the order. Three days later I picked it up from the UPS depot in Eastleigh (there are two in Eastleigh as I found out, but one is called UPS Southampton and the other UPS Eastleigh, obvious really). I came home and opened it all up, wondering what it could possibly contain. Well it contained:

• 1 CD
• 1 booklet containing the T&C in 10 languages
• 1 booklet containing the registration instructions (in 10 languages)
  

So what were the registration instructions? Well step one says:

"Go to www.apple.com/uk/support/register."

So I have gone online to buy a warrenty that has to be registered online, and now I have over 250 pages of usless paper.

Well I guess the paper did give me one piece of useful information, It gave me a registration number which I had to enter when I registered.

So I can understand that if I bought it in the shop I would need something, but I bought it online, they could have just taken me through everything at once. Job done. No paper, no need to ship something I'll probably just recycle across the country, have it driven to my house twice, and have me drive to Eastleigh to pick it up.

Grr.
آلاسداير (Alasdair)

Big Mac

I've been using a MacBook Pro at work for a few months now and I think it is awesome.

Even more awesome is the amount of memory it has. I bet google doesn't have this much.


See 17 million TB of memory for just one process. I knew Java was hungry, but really.

Alasdair

Blogger and Safari

As you will be aware from recent posts I have a MacBook Pro. So I am writing this blog post from my new computer using the Mac browser Safari.

The problem is that blogger does not seem to support Safari. I can spell check, and pictures, but all the other editing options are not there. No options for WYSWSG editing, which is a shame. I have to use firefox, which is OK, but I would like to be able to use Safari too.

UPDATE: The spell check does not work in Safari, but there is a button for it.

One of my colleagues (David Currie) from work uses WordPress hosted on a slicehost slice. I have to admit to having been tempted to do likewise (although paying three months or more in advance is a little scary).

This would also allow me to have the comment page look like the blog, rather than looking like blogger. I could also move my website hosting so alasdar.info does not just redirect to www.logicali.com which is my older domain name.

It would be more expensive than my current website host, but I might get to play a little more. At the same time I am not sure I am geeky enough to do that.

Alasdair

P.S. Finally managed to encode a video for playback on PSP. Yay!

My MacBook Pro is here

Hi,

My MacBook Pro arrived. In the end it arrived only a week after it was originally supposed to.

The process of purchase was more painful that I would have hoped. For instance I was never contacted by anyone to say when it was to be delivered. I only found out because I checked my order online.

That was another thing. Firefox 2.0.0.5 does not trust the certificate presented by the apple order tracking web app, which was odd. I think (but it was hard to know) that the certificate was signed by Network Solutions, but there was no chain of trust.

Anyway, I am happy so far. I just need to get my files transfered across from the old iBook.

Alasdair

Yet more delays from Apple

So this is not them delaying the next version of Mac OS again. Just the dispatch of my MacBook Pro. It was supposed to be shipped out today, so today I get an email that says:

The demand for the product you ordered has been higher than anticipated. We are shipping as quickly as possible, but cannot meet the dispatch date we previously estimated for you. We now expect to dispatch your order by 19.07.2007.

and then

Your business is very important to us, and we apologise for any inconvenience that this change may cause.

So now I will have to have waited over a month before I get my new toy. Grrr.

Alasdair

Just bought a MacBook Pro

I have finally given in. My 5 year old iBook died earlier this year and I have just given into the temptation and ordered a new MacBook Pro.

I opted to upgrade the harddrive from a 5400rpm model to a 7200rpm model. At work I have a ThinkPad and I definatly notice the hard drive being slow. It certainly makes my machine much slower.

I'll have to blog again when it arrives.

Thanks
Alasdair