1 week with a MacBook

Well, it’s been one week since I bit the bullet and purchased my first Apple Computer.

I purchased the MacBook from JB Hi-Fi at Cairns Central last Saturday.  My main reason for the purchase was that I was sick of having people at work calling up using Macs and I was struggling to help them.  So I spent the $$ and got a new MacBook with the following configuration:

• 160Gb Hard Drive
• 2Gb Memory
• NVIDIA 9400m graphics (256mb)

Further in depth technical specs are available here from Apple’s MacBook page.

I was skeptical about only having the 160Gb drive as I was originally going to get a 250Gb drive and was considering getting the RAM upgraded to 4Gb as well; however this was an unfounded concern to say the least.

Apple state that the MacBook battery will provide up to 5 hours of wireless productivity.  I found that the unit managed to live up to this; the Dell that I had previously would only get about 3 hours out of a full charge but that was a gaming laptop so, the comparison was possibly a little unfair.

Once I got home, I unpacked the unit and powered it up with the re-charger connected so that it would have a full charge before I really gave the unit a good work out.

I had a play with the unit and found that it booted with no issues and was very responsive.  Still, there were many other things that I wanted to do as well to give it a good workout; some of these included being able to work with the unit and see how long the battery lasted before needed to be recharged.

I also purchased Microsoft Office 2008 Home and Student with the MacBook for $195.00.  Well, here was my test for the battery life:

• Install Office 2008: This is 1.1Gb of disk requirement and reading this off the drive would drain a fair bit out of the battery.
• Browsing the Internet: Couple the Office 2008 install with intermittent browsing to multiple sites in Mozilla FireFox over the wireless network.
• Installing system updates: That was available from Apple; again flogging the wireless adapter and giving the Wireless N adapter in the unit a good test out as well.

Office 2008 takes a bit of time to install, but then again so does Office 2007 on the PC platform, the drive was reasonably constant and the system automatically checked for updates on completion and installed the latest service release for Mac Office.

While Office was installing I had up to 4 tabs open in Firefox browsing various sites including Facebook, agt.id.au, Entrecard and The Register amongst others.  on completion of the office install, I updated the OS X operating system using Apple’s update application.

All up the battery lasted for 3 hours plus with the super drive reading and writing, the wireless card downloading applications from the Internet and checking out various apps that came with the OS.

The system although only having 2Gb of system memory, has been performing well with no lags jitters or hanging.  It really makes me wonder what the hell Microsoft have done to their operating system to require about 3Gb to run Vista smoothly.

Overall I am very happy with the computer and have even given the Dell XPS 1530 laptop to my wife to use as the Mac does everything that I need and in some cases even more.