I’m not sure I dig this (as I think it removes the entire point of an iPad) but I will give 100 points for style to the iPad Keyboard Case that effectively turns the iPad into a laptop.

Setting up the new 15-inch Macbook Pro. The Migration Assistant is absolutely incredible.

Two years ago, near the one-year anniversary of my purchasing this black Macbook I wrote (sorry for the long quote, but please read on):

“I use my Macbook on a daily basis. I’ve put it through its paces. I’ve taken it on several trips across the country and it has always performed perfectly for me. The battery life is sufficient, the screen size is nearly perfect, its extensibility with external monitors and even my television is an added benefit. I have no real complaints.

I’d say the only thing that I would change, now that I’ve used it for an entire year, would be the size of the hard drive (though much larger sizes are now available in current models). The hard drive is only 80GB in this model of the Macbook which is not large enough for me to keep all of my music, video, and photos locally on the computer. Being that I’m using a laptop that may never be possible so I’ll always be tethered to some external drive(s) when I need that data.

I’ve had the opportunity to upgrade to a Macbook Pro but I am going to stick with this Macbook. I may even run it into the ground I love it so much. Even if I did upgrade to a larger hard drive, faster processor, and the ability to have much RAM – I’d probably still stick with the black Macbook. I really like the form factor, size, and weight of this computer. It has been the best computer I’ve ever owned.”

Not too bad a review. Two years later I still have the same, single complaint about the Macbook model I have – hard drive space. Today more than ever 80GB is simply not enough to do, well, anything with media. Photos from my DSLR, on average for a compressed JPEG, are about 3-5Mb a photo. Video, music, documents, podcasts, TV shows and movies from iTunes, etc. all take up a lot of space. If it weren’t for a few external hard drives I’d be all but stuck. But that isn’t the point of this post and you all deal with this the same as I do I’d bet.

After three years of using this Macbook I still feel the same about it today as I did then. It has been the best computer I’ve ever owned. The Macbook looks the same today as it did the very first day I bought it. This isn’t due to my care, but rather to its rigid design. I have never reinstalled the operating system, it has never slowed down, and I have never needed to reboot it due to freezing. That isn’t due to seldom use, in fact I’ve used it nearly every single day for many, many hours a time for all three years, but rather to the Mac OS being simply awesome. I’ve really enjoyed using this computer.

Having said that I’d be remiss not to mention that I recently purchased a replacement battery for the Macbook. The original one simple won’t hold a charge for more than a few minutes. According to Apple’s own documentation they acknowledge the number of times you can recharge the battery – and I exceeded that and then some.

I said, in the one year review, that I’d probably stick with the black Macbook because I like the form factor, size, and weight of the computer. Times change. The black Macbook is no more. Apple no longer offers it. It has been replaced with what is now the unibody aluminum 13″ Macbook Pro. It also looks like a fine machine.

It is time to move on. Eliza’s computer is, if you can believe it, much older than the black Macbook and so she will be getting this computer and I will be moving onto another one. But to what? I’ll leave that for another time.

Random 60: Laptop or Desktop? | Favorite on Viddler.

Laptops are more powerful today than the computer used to launch the Space Shuttle in the 1960s. That is a fact. Look it up. That said, some people prefer desktops with much larger storage devices, displays, amounts of RAM, etc.

I’ve been using laptops since 2002 and haven’t gone back to desktops since. What about you? Laptop or Desktop?

Working at Panera Bread.

“I have been able to do everything in my daily work on the Air. This includes using multiple spaces, constantly streaming iTunes radio music, using many tabs in Safari, casual Photoshop use, taking notes and recording lectures in Word 2008, watching episodes of Top Gear and doing web development with Firefox.”

(Source: Review: MacBook Air)

My friend Matt, a fan of all things Apple and future switcher, owns a laptop. Actually it is a tablet-PC and has all of the latest hardware and software including a 64bit processor and gobs of RAM. Though my blood runs thick with Mac-cells, I know a good piece of hardware when I see it, and Matt’s laptop is top-of-the-line. There is only one problem; it came pre-installed with Windows Vista.

I’ve only got limited experience with Vista but from that limited experience I have drawn the opinion that if I were forced to use the Operating System full time I’d likely jump off of a bridge. This isn’t to say that I’m not willing to admit that in many ways Vista is vastly superior to its predecessors (like, say, in the security department) but I don’t even like the way that it does these few things better. You know what? We’ll get into this at a whole different time, b’okay?

So Matt has a great laptop that runs Vista. Fast forward to ‘the other day’ and Matt picked himself up a brand-new shiny iPhone. If you know Matt, and some of you reading this do, you’ll know that at this point Matt’s blood is practically boiling with excitement. He probably can’t shut his mouth for even a second and his hair has gone straight. This kid wanted an iPhone pretty badly.

Matt Dottle approves

Matt calls me: “Dude, I got an iPhone! Now what do I need to do? Just go home and plug it in right?” My reply: “Yeah. Everything should work man you just bought an Apple product. Go home. Make sure you have the latest version of iTunes and you should be all good.”

I think by now you realize where this is going. Matt installed the latest version of iTunes, plugged in his iPhone and received the following message: “iPhone not recognized in this version of iTunes.” This message is a bit of a misnomer but I’ll skip right to the part where I explain what is going on here.

During the iTunes installation Vista blocked the iPhone’s USB driver from being installed.

It is pretty much as simple as that. I don’t care if there are good or bad reasons for why this happens. And I don’t care whose fault it is because I’m blaming both Apple and Microsoft for not displaying an error message about how to fix the issue. But I think this sucks.

Oh, you know what sucks worse: If you are running Windows Vista 64bit you can not use iPhone. You will get this same error message mention above only you won’t be able to solve the issue like we did. It is merely a footnote on Apple’s Web site under minimum system requirements for iPhone. I am not sure if this is Apple dragging its feet on a 64bit driver for Windows or if this is something on Microsoft’s end.

So here is how you fix it in the 32bit version of Windows Vista; You need to turn off UAC, User Access Control, before you begin the iTunes installation. So if you’ve already installed iTunes, uninstall it using the same installer that you used to install iTunes, then turn off UAC by opening your Control Panel and searching for User Access Control in the top right hand search box. Install iTunes again, and voila!

I’m happy that there is a solution, and I’m not that bitter, it just took way too long to find the answer to this problem and I would love to see Apple or Microsoft handle this issue a little better. Having a better error message would go a long way I think.

Combine this UAC headache and the fact that we couldn’t activate iPhone for him until the next day and you see why we were frustrated.

My next story will be about Epson’s printers. Have you had any crappy tech experiences lately? Pingback this post if you have.

My laptop’s hard drive is 80Gb. Currently I have 5.17Gb free on the entire drive (see screenshot). How much space is that really? Considering that one of my passions is photos – and that I have two digital cameras that each have 1Gb sticks, this means that I only have the room on my laptop to hold 5 more sets of photos from these cameras. This is very depressing to me.

I’m hoping to find a solution to this problem by switching to Aperture and having it store my full-res photos on an external hard drive, while keeping decent resolution thumbnails on my laptop’s drive for viewing when not at home.

My main reason for wanting to win the Seagate “I need more storage so that…” contest, would be so that I could keep taking photos and not have to decide what personal data to keep just because I don’t have the room to store it.

[tags]seagate contest, hard drives, laptop, contest, entry, podtech, seagate[/tags]
[slug]need-storage[/slug]