My new MacBook

Phaser

Phaser

Phaser

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Joined
17 Mar 2004
Posts
1,562
OK, so it came today and i've had chance to play with it for a few hours.

Very impressed with the build quality, and it's running fine with just the 1GB of RAM installed (currently got Cyberduck, 3 Firefox tabs, Adium, Finder and iTunes running). I suspect it'd be a little bit laggy if I was using Photoshop etc but i've yet to get this installed. Will be getting 2GB or even 4GB in the next couple of weeks.

I love the way you can download programs, drag them across to the Applications folder and they're installed as easily as that.

Annoyed with the fact the machine goes into sleep after a few mins, meaning you can't download overnight etc. Seems very pointless, hopefully InsomniaX will get round that.

Yet to try streaming movies from my external 500GB FireWire drive, and I haven't had time to connect it to my 27" HD LCD tele yet either. (I did connect it to my 19" TFT and was dissapointed with the quality though - going to look into this further as eventually i'm hoping to have it rigged up to a 24" TFT.

Overall i'm impressed, although i'm not sure if it's worth nearly £800 (with HE discount). (Nearly 1k when you add the cables + mouse/keyboard/cases etc).

Ordered one of those hard clear covers off eBay for a tenner for when it's sitting around on my desk. Will also be getting a carry case when I find one that i like (anyone got any good links to some?)

Some photos...

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Phaser said:
OK, so it came today and i've had chance to play with it for a few hours.



Annoyed with the fact the machine goes into sleep after a few mins, meaning you can't download overnight etc. Seems very pointless, hopefully InsomniaX will get round that.
Click to expand...

You can change the sleep time out in the energy saver preferences. Also when I leave an application doing something (encoding/downloading) it doesn't usually go to sleep until it has finished :)

Enjoy your new toy! I certainly like mine and think it was worth every penny.
 
Matthew.M said:
You can change the sleep time out in the energy saver preferences. Also when I leave an application doing something (encoding/downloading) it doesn't usually go to sleep until it has finished :)

Enjoy your new toy! I certainly like mine and think it was worth every penny.
Click to expand...

Yep, they're clever like that. I quite happily leave my MBP seeding torrents etc with no problems overnight. It only has a kip when it's got nothing to do!

The Mac will quite probably look "different" compared to a PC on an external monitor due to 1) the font smoothing 2) the gamma settings. Calibrating the monitor or setting to sRGB in my experience sorts out the colour problems.
 
OK cheers for that, i'm sure I had a look in the Energy Saving settings but couldn't see anything, will have another look. :)

And I don't mean the font smoothing looked weird, it just didn't look like it was at 1280x1024 (19" TFT) even though the display properties on the MacBook said so. Will try calibrating it and see if it makes a difference.
 
I'vr had my Macbook for about 3 weeks and am very happy with it so far. I'm running Vista on VMware and put in 4gbs of Ram which really sped up Photoshop no end - for about £100 it's well worth it (except that leaves 2 x 512megs to try and sell!).
I've got mine attached to my 23" display and it looks great, although it does look a little different to how the PC looked..I think the larger fonts make it look a little odd, but once I calibrated it, it looks excellent. I've also connect mine to my 50" plasma but am having trouble with the overscan - it's either too small with it off, or it cuts off the menus with it on..I've downloaded DisplayConfigX to try and solve this though.
Coming from Media Center I was very disappointed with Front Row though, it seems incredibly basic in comparison which is a surprise.
Oh, make sure and download VLC, it's a brilliant all-in-one media player :)
 
Cheers mate, got VNC on the download now, although I did download Perian.

Really impressed with my MacBook, I originally thought the 13" screen would be too small and that i'd be using it connected up to my TFT but to be honest it's been fine for me so far and I haven't felt the need to do that yet.

Had a couple of issues with Airport dropping and some Bittorrent probs but thanks to OCUK/Google i've got it all sorted and back to enjoying the whole Mac experience!

It's kind of ironic but the same day I got my Mac delivered, my PC decided to go mad spouting error messages everywhere, haven't even bothered switching it on since!
 
Phaser said:
Cheers mate, got VNC on the download now, although I did download Perian.

Really impressed with my MacBook, I originally thought the 13" screen would be too small and that i'd be using it connected up to my TFT but to be honest it's been fine for me so far and I haven't felt the need to do that yet.

Had a couple of issues with Airport dropping and some Bittorrent probs but thanks to OCUK/Google i've got it all sorted and back to enjoying the whole Mac experience!

It's kind of ironic but the same day I got my Mac delivered, my PC decided to go mad spouting error messages everywhere, haven't even bothered switching it on since!
Click to expand...


:O Same thing happened to me with my new macbook :eek:
 
Phaser said:
OK cheers for that, i'm sure I had a look in the Energy Saving settings but couldn't see anything, will have another look. :)
Click to expand...

I'm not sure whats not to see? Open System Preferences > Energy Saver and there are two sleep sliders, one for system and one for just the display. Just set each one as appropriate. :)

I'm running Tiger though, so unless this is different in Leopard...
 
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