I just upgraded my MacBook Pro’s RAM to 2GB and I find it runs a lot faster. With only 1GB, running Windows XP in Parallels Workstation slows down the entire system, but now there’s no slowdown.
BEFORE
AFTER
Macintosh
No MacBooks today
It looks like all of the rumor sites were wrong for a change. They were all predicting that Apple would announce the MacBook non-Pro, a replacement for the iBook. There were no Apple hardware announcements today. Furthermore, I have proof that G4 iBooks were still being manufactured as recently as last month.
I’ve been dealing with a large school deployment of iBooks. Just for fun, I ran a few of the serial numbers through this Mac serial number decoder. The results told that those machines were manufactured in April 2006.
MacBook Pro RAM Upgrade
I find that my 2 GHz MacBook Pro (which only has 1GB of RAM) runs noticeably slower than my 1.83 GHz iMac (which has 1.5GB) when running Windows in Parallels Workstation. Activity Monitor shows only 15M of RAM free, so I just ordered another 1G of RAM for it.
Network failure
While using my iMac today I had a very strange network failure, which I attributed to Parallels Workstation at first.
Built-in Ethernet suddenly lost its IP address and would no longer connect. All attempts to obtain an IP address failed. In the network setup panel I noticed a new port, vi2, which is Parallels’ bridged network interface. The new interface had a valid IP address in the 10.x.x.x range, although my home network uses the 192.168.0.x range. The only way I could get network connectivity was with Airport. Unloading Parallel’s KEXT also didn’t fix it.
Finally I tried swapping among the ports on my Linksys ethernet switch and it suddenly started working. My G4 still worked when connected to the port my iMac was originally connected to, so it’s not a bad port.
TextMate
I tried TextMate today and I got hooked immediately. I’ve always been a BBEdit user, but I found that TextMate has a lot of nice unique features. I especially like the source code folding feature, which lets you collapse functions and other sections of code. I ended up buying it within an hour of trying it.
MacBook Pro – Day 1
After my first full day with my MacBook Pro, I love it. I was concerned about the “whine” some people report, but this one is absolutely silent. On the rare occasions when the fan starts up, it’s still much quieter than the PowerBook. I haven’t seen any of the other problems people mentioned and the screen is flawless. PhotoShop CS2 isn’t too bad. It doesn’t feel much slower than it did on my old PowerBook G4. The screen is much brighter and a lot nicer than the PowerBook. It does get noticeably warmer than the PowerBook, though.
MacBook Pro
My MacBook Pro arrived this afternoon. The first thing that struck me was how small the box is. It’s about half as thin as the box from my PowerBook G4. The MacBook Pro itself is slightly slimmer than the PowerBook.
Batch rename
Several times I’ve had to rename a group of files, usually to change extensions. I usually ended up using a shell command such as ‘for f in *.xyz …’, but thanks to the comments at this blog post, I discovered two very nice batch rename utilities. Renamer4Mac is very nice, free GUI utility. There’s also an elegant command line tool, rename, which lets you use perl expressions to specify how the name should be modified.
MacBook Pro
I ordered a MacBook Pro from PowerMax with a trade-in of my 15″ PowerBook G4. I also bought that machine from them, trading in my 12″ PowerBook G4. I should have it next week. This leaves my G4 minitower as the only PowerPC system for testing & development.