Archive for MacBook
TV on your Mac
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Was in town today and looking through The Good Guys and saw an Elgato EyeTV DTT USB stick for $145.00. Having previously configured TV cards on both Windows and Linux, I wondered how things would be on my MacBook.
The reputation of Apple Products to “just work” would possibly be put to the test with these as TV cards or USB TV sticks can be a bit of a pain to configure and get running, particularly under Linux depending on the relevant chipset of the card.
Still, after speaking to one of the guys there who had a Mac and also one of these little sticks, he assured me that they worked just fine so long as you plug in your aerial cable to the stick as Cairns has less than great reception for TV, which does not appear to be getting a boost any times soon. This appears to be more to the point of being caused by the surrounding mountains than anything else.
After getting a reduction of $10.00 off the cost down to $135.00 I walked out with a USB TV stick which I was a bit skeptical of but quietly confident of getting to work.
After getting home I fired up the Mac and put everything together, hoping that the little aerial would pick up some stations so as I didn’t have to go searching for a coax cable for reception. Unfortunately, as I expected, there was no joy with the little aerial and no stations wee picked up when running the configuration utility after installing the software, so off to get a bit of coax I went and retrieved a cable form my old Windows PC.
On plugging the coax in, and re-running the signal detection, 25 stations were detected including 3 or so radio connections. All the HD free to air channels were found as were the ones that had been notoriously hard to get in channels 9 and 10. I was glad that the new OneHD channel was also detected as well as it screens some great sport from time to time.
I then started flicking through all the channels and found that reception was great and that the interface on the supplied software was just as easy to use and get an understanding on.
Compared to configuring a TV card / stick on Windows or Linux this was so easy it wasn’t funny!
I sat and watched 25 minutes of the 2009 NRL Grand Final and there were only a few stutters with the broadcast; this was more due to signal quality than anything else as we regularly get this sort of thing on the Sony TV that we have as well.
If you’re also looking to get TV on your Mac then I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this product to you as I had no issues and if you live in an area where you an get a good strong TV signal then the supplied little aerial may work with no issues – it would be great if it did! Still, if you are like me then so long as you have some coax that you can plug into an aerial socket then you will be good to go and should also have no problems.
1 week with a MacBook
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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.
I’m thinking about getting a Mac
Posted by: | CommentsYep, you read right; I’m thinking about getting a Mac…
They’ve been around for ages with my earliest recollections of them being these funny looking boxes with Mac OS 7 on them, they were the first computer to have a mouse and a Windowed OS, more recently, they have been upgraded to be based on the FreeBSD operating system called OS X.
OS X ushered in a new era of stability for people using Macs; it provided the renowned networking stack of FreeBSD with the robustness of a solid Unix OS. Macs have been used by graphic designers for and music enthusiasts for years, now they have hit the mainstream with their use and uptake now being second behind Microsoft Windows. For more information on OS X, have a look at the Apple page here; also the FreeBSD home page here. Of course, Apple’s OS X page is not to be forgotten in all this reminiscing 
Still, the reason why I am seriously considering one in the near future; and by that I mean in the next month at worst, is that there has been a big upswing in the amount of clients at work that are using them and I cannot afford to pretend that they are in the minority any longer. In the last two months, I’ve been caught short in my support abilities with the Mac to the point that I just don’t know the OS well enough to be able to support it properly. Put me in front of one and I can find my way around it without too much trouble, however without a unit in front of me; I tend to flounder a bit and it’s just not good enough for my own standards.
So with some cash flow being freed up recently; I have the room to move and will probably look at getting one in the next few weeks.
I am considering a MacBook with the following configuration:
- MacBook 2.13Ghz
- 250Gb HDD
- 2 Gb RAM
I’m also going to get MS Office 2008 for Mac as well as it comes with a free mouse for $200.00; all up it will cost me $1816.00 including GST and shipping which is pretty good based on my shopping around. I’m going to get it from ZeroThree in Melbourne at this stage; the owner of the store is a client at work and I know that he has great reputation in the Apple community and fantastic customer ethic.
I was going to consider a MacBook Pro, but I just cannot justify the extra cost for what I feel is only a backlit keyboard and built in SD memory slot. The slightly faster CPU (.1 of a Ghz) is irrelevant in my opinion; USB memory card readers are cheap as they come these days.
I’d like to have 4Gb memory straight off but that can come later; the base model comes with a 160Gb drive which I am taking up to 250gb as I figure it’s easier to upgrade memory later as opposed to hard drive, having to do a whole OS rebuild as a result.
Have you bought the latest MacBook? What is you opinion about the unit; do you think that my configuration above is solid or should I make a change somewhere? Let me know your opinion by leaving a comment below.
