I’ve had my new MacBook Pro for several weeks now. As I planned to, I purchased Parallels and installed Windows XP Pro SP2 on it. Ironically, installing XP via Parallels was so much easier than installing it on a regular PC. A nice bonus was the fact that Parallels includes a feature that installs a full version of Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0 (6-month license) once you have Windows XP installed. That’s a really nice touch, sort of a “mint on the pillow” thing. It’s just so cool to be able to run XP and Mac OS side by side… and not in the old-school emulation way of past methods of running Windows on a Mac. I haven’t really done very much with my MB Pro yet — except for downloading the entire season of “Sleeper Cell: American Terror” from iTunes (it really makes “24” look like Sesame Street). I tell you, I am thoroughly impressed by the Front Row interface (I especially love the Movie Trailers feature). I hope Apple builds on it by offering some kind of PVR functionality in the future (I know all about EyeTV from Elgato). I have been reading posts about the various battery issues that MacBook Pros have been having, such as the battery “bloat” issue… so I will be keeping an eye on the battery.
Last week, I brought my MB Pro with me to a client’s home to help me troubleshoot some issues they were having after they had a power surge due to a transformer exploding in their neighborhood. They managed to get their Earthlink DSL Internet working again and their old G4 iMac seemed to still be alive and kicking. But both their HP printers were unable to print from the iMac. First thing I did was try the printers directly attached to a USB port on the iMac, thinking that perhaps the USB hub they were attached to took damage from the power hit. Neither printer would print. Next, I tried both printers on my MB Pro — and presto, they printed just fine. So at least I knew the printers themselves were functional — but what was going on with printing from the client’s iMac? I vaguely remembered something I was told by HP support about printer troubleshooting on a Mac… and that was to delete all the preference files from the Library:preferences folder. So I uninstalled the printers, deleted all the HP related preference files, restarted the Mac, then reconnect the printers. Shazam! They were printing fine again and the clients were jumping for joy.
Over last weekend, I was working with another client who needed me to get his Palm LifeDrive PDA synching with his new MacBook Pro. Easy as pie. He was pretty excited, because his old 17″ PowerBook G4 had a hard drive failure, and he didn’t have his contacts backed up. They were still on his Palm LifeDrive, and once I got iSync reconfigured, all his contact data came back into his Mac OS X Address Book. We then bumped up his .Mac storage to 2gb and then setup OS X Backup to run scheduled backups daily to his iDisk. He had recently purchased an AppleTV, so I had a chance to kick the tires on it. It was setup on his new Vizio HD Plasma, and it looked really good. The interface is essentially the same as on FrontRow on a newer Mac. Although it worked really well, I am still considering using a Mac Mini as a media hub once I decide to tweak my entertainment system a little. I’m waiting for Apple to speed bump the Mac Mini to a full Intel Core 2 Duo before I do anything. My logic is that with a full Mac, the media that feeds Front Row isn’t dependent on synching with other sources, like AppleTV needs to. Plus it’s a full Mac, and you can do all sorts of other fun things on the big screen. Still, I was impressed by AppleTV, and I think Apple will sell a fair number of these puppies.
[tags]MacBook, Apple, AppleTV[/tags]