MacBook: Three Weeks of Impressions

And now to follow up on my slightly vitriolic post from the other week. The short version of it is that bogo_lode was pretty much right on. More time has helped quite a lot and I’m liking the system a lot better than I did previously. It helps that I finally got set up with an MSDN account (thanks, work!) and have XP SP2 installed in a VMWare Fusion image—so I have access on this laptop to a few random pieces of software that aren’t available on the Mac, like Visual Studio.

I can also install Microsoft Money—and may do so—but in the mean time I’ve bitten the bullet and bought a copy of Quicken for Mac. It’s not as horrible as the previous versions I’ve used, though I don’t like how Intuit’s policies basically screw Mac users; as I understand it they charge banks an additional fee to support Quicken for Mac even though there is no technical reason for doing so.

I continue to hate the Quicktime client with a burning passion, but on bogo_lode’s advice I’ve switched to NicePlayer and am using that instead. I’ve not yet installed the Perian codecs pack, since I don’t run into a lot of unusual stuff that causes problems. I’m sure I’ll get around to it, however.

Coming back to VMWare Fusion for a moment—that’s a very nice piece of software. Windows is pretty snappy in it and once you install the VMWare tools add-on in the Windows guest, it’s pretty nice to use. It’s pretty graceful in handling changes between my 800×600 windowed mode and 1280×800 full-screen mode. I’m pretty happy to have it around since it means I can use my fast laptop with the readable screen to hit the company VPN and remote-desktop into my PC at work—always a very useful ability.

I haven’t had any time to get into Ruby on Rails, although I do have Locomotive installed once I have time to play with that. I’ll probably end up picking up a copy of TextMate, though, since that editor is like vi or emacs was reborn and made usable. There are a few other little applications here and there that I’d like to pick up, though I’m not in a rush on some of them. I’m also probably going to see about getting a 2×1GB RAM kit to stuff into this, particularly since it’s very affordable on Crucial.

I continue to really like the hardware. MagSafe has saved me from yanking the machine off the desk several times. The PC is fast and snappy and OS X hasn’t beachballed on me very many times. The screen is also really bright and readable, and the glossiness hasn’t given me any issues so far. The one complaint I do have, as far as the screen goes, is that it seems to pick up dirt and fingerprints pretty easily. I need to find a good solution for cleaning that… if anyone has any suggestions there, let me know.