lofton.net

I finally upgraded my personal system. I had been wanting to get a new Intel based Mac for quite a while now. My previous system was a powerbook g4 which has been a rock solid machine for the past 3 years. Yet since the announcement of the Intel switch I have been drooling over each new system release. As a web developer being able to run Windows and test pages in IE and yet still use a mac for developing has been managed by having two systems sit on my desk. Which is a pain in the buttox and takes up room I could use for… for what I don’t know. I was going to say laying out notes, but I rarely print things out anymore. Well I will have room to put whatever I want instead of a PC.

So I went with the white MacBook. I love everything about it… the keyboard is just fine for me a semi-touch typist. I really do not touch type but every now and then I get going and actually don’t look at the keys. I also like the built in iSight. The remote is cool, but I haven’t really needed it yet. I was originally thinking of getting the black, but after seeing them in the store, I felt the black was too much like the old powerbooks from g3 days or even like many black PC laptops. The white is actually the unique one, glossy case with a grey handrest and screen trim. It is clearly not a PC. If the black had been glossy then I would have been interested. I know it would show smudges and finger prints, but nearly everyone wraps their laptop in a case anyways.

The user interface is of course the same. I am pretty much transferred over to the new system. Just a few minor tweaks to go. I have also installed XP in a virtual space and can pop in and put of Windows when ever needed. Very nice… I tried to install Vista, and actually succeeded, but for some reason it would not connect to the internet. I will try it one more time then give it up… let me say that from what I saw initially… Vista is a disaster. From a usability perspective it is so different from previous Microsoft OSs that it will cause problems. Case in point, I could not get it to connect to the internet. I am very good with computers… I have run, used and configured most OSs including linux. But this was nuts… I could not determine if I was missing the driver or that it wasn’t configured correctly. It just kept telling me how to go about setting up wireless, which I did not want. Oh well I’ll wipe it and install it again and we will see how it turns out…

Well after going over all the possibilities, I could see that the driver was not installed. Since this is a virtual machine (vm) I was going to need special drivers from the vm system. Probably had I actually read the instructions for the vm I would have known I needed to run the tools installer to make that happen. It was just confusing because I did a XP install and it did not need the special drivers. So now I am playing around with Vista a little more and it does look nice to some extent.