Welcome to the 21st Century

So I purchased a Macbook. I waited until I had it for a bit before posting about it. I’ve only had it for two days, but am really enjoying it thus far. I will post photos later.

This is not a review. There are enough of those already.

The screen is excellent, the keyboard only takes a few minutes to get used to, the touch-pad is very natural, and the heat issues are… intermittent, and very dependent on ambient-temperature. During the day, my machine tends to idle anywhere from 50 - 60 Celsius. Night tends to drop a few degrees to 45 - 52.

Load is a very different matter. Temperature seems to peek at about 80 or so, when the fan kicks on full (the fan starts at low speed at around 65). After the fan runs at full speed, it brings the temperature down to about 70-72, where it seems to stay.

Today I slipstreamed Service Pack 2 onto my Windows XP installation CD, as well as downloading the Ubuntu Dapper release CD (I had previously used pre-release builds to install). I did not get around to installing, however, due to some stability issues in Mac OS X.

First of all, allow me to thank apple very much for the hardware diagnostic utility on the install disc! Holding ‘D’ while booting with the install disc in the system brings up a utility that will do a complete hardware diagnostic. As it turns out, one of my 1GB SO-DIMMs is bad. After testing each piece (2x256 it shipped with, and 2x1GB I replaced them with) in each slot, I narrowed my stability issue to one particular SO-DIMM (as opposed to the slot – thankfully).

Tomorrow I should be able to send the 1GB back and have it replaced. I’ll also try out installing windows (Only if Galactic Civilizations won’t work in Windows through Parallels). I’ll definitely at least have Ubuntu running on here.

More as it comes…