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Saturday, February 16, 2008

New MacBook!

Just bought my first Mac...a black MacBook. I bought it with 1 GB of RAM, but immediately went to Newegg.com and purchased 4 GB of RAM to replace the original 1 GB that came with the system. So far so good. My Dell XPS went on the fritz late last week. It looks like the nVidia video card went to hell and now none of the operating systems will boot up on it. And the Dell is off warranty, so it's going to cost me some money to get the thing fixed. Oh well. So I'm rolling with the MacBook. For Windows, I'm going with VMware Fusion on the MacBook.

9 comments:

  1. OK... so now that you have your MacBook, is your comment about Compiz being much better than Windows or OS X still true?

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  2. Absolutely! I still think Compiz Fusion rocks. I really like where Compiz is going and Linux in general. However, using Linux at clients (I'm a consultant) can be touch and go. I wanted a laptop that was going to be pretty much no maintenance. I felt that MacBook would provide that, plus I was very impressed with the Mac when I used it at a client from July 2007-January 2008. I'm really not happy with the quality of the Dell laptop that I have (Dell XPS M170). Way too unstable and quirky, especially when running Windows Vista. I'm running VMware Fusion on the MacBook so I can do my Windows/.NET work and that has been working out well.

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  3. BTW, I still have Ubuntu Linux and Compiz Fusion running on my main development workstation at home (a Quad Core box that I built and blogged about previously). The Dell XPS also has a disk for Ubuntu Linux with Compiz Fusion. So I'm not giving up on Linux or Compiz Fusion.

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  5. I've been thinking of the same investment. I'm impressed that you went with the regular MB - it seems that dev folks always want to go with the MB Pro. I would too, but not for the price difference. The MB is where the value is. I'm assuming you are finding that the thing screams, especially with the 4 GB memory. Can it use all that? I read somewhere that it can only reference 3 of that. Or was that an older MB?

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  6. Peter,

    Yes, the MacBook can use all 4 GB of RAM. And the thing screams. I did miss out on the new Intel chip refresh that recently occurred, but I'm still very happy with my MacBook. I really enjoy the size of the MacBook. I'm finding that I use the MacBook all over the house and I take it to meetings. I never did that with my old Dell XPS.

    -- chris --

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  7. Hi Chris, I have a similar system and have received some error messages when running Fusion. Once I am in there though i notice that the fan speeds up and the macbook gets warmer. Have you had the same results? Are you still using Fusion? have you tried parallels?

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  8. Belkhaldar,

    I haven't received any error messages while running VMware Fusion. It will rev up the fans and make the computer a bit hotter, but that's about all I've seen from running it on my MacBook. I'm very impressed with Fusion. Works great!

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