Love My 'Early 2008' MacBook Pro
From Mike:
Hi,
I recently "rediscovered" LEM and have been following your columns
on whether to purchase a refurb last-gen 15" MacBook Pro, MacBook, etc.
I was in the same position, and for reasons which were pretty much the
same as the ones you mentioned went with the "early '08" MBP.
At the time, Apple had sold out of refurbs, but I found a semi-local
dealer selling them for only $50 more ($1,400). I had to pay sales tax,
as I would have purchasing from Apple, and I drove the 30 miles to save
on shipping and to have it in my hands as quickly (and safely) as
possible.
All I can say is that I love this machine. The unibody MBP's
certainly are nice, but for my money, not quite $600 more worth of
nice. I'm really glad that I had read your column, as it helped confirm
that I really had made the right decision. Good luck with yours!
Mike
Hi Mike,
Glad you've found my musings interesting and helpful,
and delighted to hear that you're pleased with the previous generation
MacBook Pro.
I'm still dithering on the fence myself. A refurb 2.4
GHz plastic MacBook would probably be a rational choice for me, but
I've been spoiled by the 17" display in my PowerBook.
Charles
Great Upgrade Advice!
From Ronald:
Charles,
Regarding your article: The 'Better Safe than Sorry' Guide
to Installing Mac OS X Updates
Great article!
I agree that taking these steps and using the combo installer
results in smooth installations.
And I also "Safe Boot", since this dumps the caches and performs
other basic routines prior to installation as well as activating the
bare minimum number of applications.
Another thing that I have found that people do wrong (in addition to
simply using the 'Software Update') . . . is to regularly use
way too many utility applications. (Norton, Micromat, Cocktail, etc.,
etc.)
I know someone that does this all too often - and has what appears
to be constant ongoing problems with her system.
It seemed like every couple of days she was posting on the Adobe
forums about how she was having constant trouble with her system
'...even though she was very often doing preventive maintenance...'
with a ridiculous number of utility apps.
I kept telling her to at least give it a test and to stop using them
(and just use Apple's Disk Utility and DiskWarrior for a
while). But she 'knew' she was doing what was best, so I finally gave
up trying to help her.
I stopped using almost all of them many years ago and have far fewer
problems.
FWIW, I use Apple's Disk Utility, DiskWarrior (an absolute must, of
course), Leopard Cache Cleaner, and Onyx. That's it. I've been doing
this for many years, and I haven't used virus software in approximately
5 years.
Years ago one version of Cocktail caused me huge problems so I
stopped using it. Other than the occasional corrupt cache or preference
file, my system is virtually trouble free.
And of course . . . I keep two complete backups of my main
320 GB hard drive . . . which mainly has given me peace of
mind. But it also allows me to test/experiment more and it's great for
the occasional bad preference file or lost/deleted email.
Also two full backups are essential.
One time when I was backing up my main drive, I made a mistake that
trashed all the data on two of my drives - and had I not had a third
drive with a second full backup, years of clients' files and personal
files would have been lost forever. I lost several days work, but
that's certainly better than years of work.
Anyway...
Hopefully users will not be lazy and instead take your advice.
Again . . . great article!
Have a great holiday season!
BTW . . . lowendmac.com is a great site and I scan it
daily in NetNewsWire.
Regards,
Ronald
Hi Ronald,
Thanks for reading and for the kind words about
LEM.
I use, but not to excess, OnyX, DiskWarrior, and Drive
Genius, which is coming on strong as a competitor for DiskWarrior in
the defrag and optimization department, and does a great deal more
besides.
I also agree that there is no such thing as too many
backups. I do double-redundancy global backups on two external hard
drives - one with Time Machine and the other with Carbon Copy Cloner,
plus I keep the internal drives on my PowerBook G4 and one of my Pismos
manually synchronized.
Charles
Unexpected Behavior from Opera 10 Alpha
From Doug:
Thanks for another great article [7 Favorite Mac Browsers],
enough depth to be worth reading, not so much detail that it gets
boring. Masterful.
Wanted to let you know, I installed the Opera 10 alpha on your say
so.
The first thing I noticed was all my speed dials were gone, then
checking bookmarks and sessions, they were all gone as well. I have
grown to depend upon those features for daily survival. I am guessing
until 10.x goes past beta, the developers do not feel the need to
expend the effort to capture old preferences.
I reinstalled 9.62 and it all came back just fine. Maybe I am the
only one to have this problem, but your readers should be aware
something like this could happen.
I don't know if you have ever tried to download or capture
multimedia content from the browsers, but that is one big confusing
mess as near as I can tell.
I had been keeping an old Mozilla browser 1.7.12 version around to
listen to one local radio station on the fringe of their coverage area.
Nothing else would stream their feed. Whether it was an update to my
machine, their feed, or what, suddenly I can no longer stream the feed.
I believe the problem is tied more into the OS X subsystems than
the browsers themselves, but if someone knowledgeable with your gift
for presentation could make some sense of it, I don't think I would be
the only one to benefit.
Congrats on another very well done article!
Hi Doug,
Thanks. Glad you enjoyed the column.
The reason your speed dials were gone is that Opera
(prudently I think) programmed the Opera 10 public alpha release to
create its own discrete Preferences Folder rather than tap into the
preferences of your current Opera 9 final install, which remains
undisturbed. I haven't tried it, and I'm not sure which Preferences
file contains the Speed Dial data (Bookmarks maybe?). but with a bit of
trial and error I think you could probably find the file with the SD
data and copy it into the Opera 10 Preferences folder. The alternative
would be to just reconfigure Speed Dial in version 10.
When 10 goes final, I expect that it will assimilate
version 9 final's Preferences settings, or at least that's what's
happened with earlier versions.
Multimedia content is basically terra incognita for me
on my home setup, since I'm limited to a dialup connection over
badly-maintained rural copper lines that gives me 26,400 throughput on
good days. Internet radio is likewise beyond the practical capability
of my Internet bottleneck.
Broadband is promised here by the end of 2009, but
with the economy tanking I'm not holding my breath.
Charles
iCab Is Also WebKit-based
From Ken:
Charles,
While I have no problems with your "favorite" browsers, it should be
noted that iCab 4.x is also another WebKit-based browser. 3.x and
earlier used the developer's own rendering engine. I never thought
those earlier releases were very compatible across the Web, nor
particularly speedy in rendering pages. Not surprisingly, iCab suddenly
became much more snappy, stable, and compatible (Safari-like in its
rendering) once it became a WebKit-based browser. But it does have some
unique features. For one thing, it works with 10.3.9 and later, whereas
Safari and most of the other WebKit browsers require Tiger or
Leopard.
You did mention Sunrise, Shiira, and OmniWeb as a WebKit-based
browsers. Thought iCab should get the same mention, because being based
on WebKit (and adding new features to it) is a good thing.
That's why so many developers, including Google, are doing it.
Ken Watanabe
Hi Ken,
You're entirely correct, and I should have mentioned
that iCab 4 .x uses the WebKit browser engine. Thanks for the
comment.
Charles
Firefox 2 and 3 Are Processor Hogs
From John Campbell:
Thank you, Charles, as you are always a good read. I agree with all
you have said about browsers over the years, especially the latest
group from your #1-#4 and #5. My only real problem is with Firefox, v.2
and 3. It hogs my processor 50-75% when loading pages. Is this common?
Or is it a sign of not enough processing power? Opera and Camino seem
to create the lightest load.
Thanks,
John
QS G4/867 MHz, 10.4.11,
1.5 GB, ATI Radeon 9200
Hi John,
It's interesting, since Camino uses the same browsing
engine as Firefox, but I've experienced something similar on my
Pismo - with Firefox 3
at least.
Firefox 3 (I'm currently using version 3.1 beta 2) is
a happy camper and good citizen on my PowerBook G4 running Leopard
10.5.5, but when I try to use it on my Pismo G4 550 MHz running
OS X 10.4.11" Tiger", it and everything else quickly slows to the
speed of cold molasses running uphill in the wintertime. It's
essentially unusable on that machine, although Camino and Navigator 2
(my current fave Mozilla Gecko browser) work just fine.
I didn't mention this in the article, since a
9-year-old hot-rodded Pismo is hardly mainstream hardware, but you may
be encountering a similar difficulty with your 867 MHz Quicksilver in
OS X 10.4.11.
Charles
You hit on my only guess that FF 3's design is more efficient on,
and perhaps coded more specifically for, Leopard and/or Intel. I like
FF's design a lot but can't complain with the other many good options
available.
John
Don't Expect Snow Leopard Support for PowerPC
Macs
From Jack
I just read this
article and thought I'd throw in my two cents. If the next 10.6
beta released to outside developers doesn't include a PowerPC build, I
think you can count PPC support out of the running. At this point,
Apple has probably compiled a majority of the system code for 10.6, so
if PPC builds haven't been made simultaneously, the chance that they
ever will be is slim.
I also can't see Apple releasing a semi-major OS version without the
requisite outside testing; that is, without testing on multiple
machines with multiple configurations (of which outside developers will
have many). I cannot fathom how a software release would fare with only
internal testing at Apple as opposed to outside testing with developers
that will have myriad different system configurations and
specifications. The possibility for bugs and issues at time of release
is way too high.
I have one of those last
Power Mac G5s that is mentioned (the Dual-Core 2.0 GHz), and while
I would love for it to run the next big cat from Cupertino, I'm not
holding my breath.
-Jack
Hi Jack,
I agree with your deduction and would rate the chances
of Snow Leopard supporting PPC as slightly greater than zero perhaps,
but not much. Could be mistaken, of course, but I'm personally
discounting any prospect for Snow Leopard running on my G4 PowerBook,
and I'm guessing G5 owners are out of luck there as well.
Charles
Eudora Withdrawal Woes
From Serafina following up on Eudora Woes:
Thanks for your help. I tried the IDS website again after getting
your reply and beta 9 had just been posted - turns out that's why the
download link was missing for a few days. I was happy with how easy it
was to set up Odysseus but I haven't been able to use it. over the last
couple weeks I've tried it when I have the time, but it crashes
whenever I try to check send/check mail - something with the sending
UIDL. It's discouraging since they say their next release will be the
official version - no more betas.
So I've been using Apple Mail in the interim and compiling a list of
Eudora features that I sorely miss. some things I've found alternate
solutions but others I'm just doing without.
I use 2 providers and since one of them recently went through an
upgrade I tried Eudora again today and was able to send and receive
mail for the first time since switching to Mac OS 10.5. so now I'm
wondering if I can use Eudora after all? I'd like to know what problems
you encounter and what are you doing at this point for an email
client?
Features I miss without Eudora:
- multiple personalities for a given ISP account!!!!!! Apple Mail
won't allow it as far as I can tell. for one account, I had as many as
four different personalities set up and even varied what the return
email address was. How are you dealing with this?
- good search function - for example can specify a window of time to
search in
- labels - using color coding so things stand out in a mailbox or I
can tell at a glance what topic area they are in and can sort by
that
- task progress
- filtering better than Apple Mail rules
- mailboxes opening up when new mail goes into them so I don't have
to keep looking for new messages all over the place - but don't want
them all coming into one inbox and then having to apply rules - got
spoiled.
- having multiple mailbox windows open is easier and having the app
remember how I sized the windows and where I placed them on the
screen
- I could change the subject line that I look at in the mailbox so
that it's more informative and tells me some of the content inside. it
does not change the subject line in the header of the message
itself.
- queuing message for future sending - this was handy. I can use iCal
and to-do's but it was quicker in Eudora.
- in Mail I can't drag and drop text in the same way while editing
like I could in Eudora
- Odysseus won't let me change the port number and it needs to be 465
for outgoing mail for one of my ISP accounts - buggy?
- in Mail, if I scroll past a message in a window (without opening
and reading) it gets marked read (loses the unread mark more
accurately). and if I delete a message above an unread message, then
the unread message below is now selected and loses its unread status.
very hard for staying organized. I would like messages to only be
marked read if I open them up and read them.
I'd love to hear any advice or thoughts. It's nice to talk to
someone who is familiar with Eudora.
thanks,
Serafina
Hi Serafina,
Yes, I don't find Odysseus 1.0b9 even close to being
ready to replace Eudora, although I haven't had any trouble with it
crashing in my tests.
For me, one make-or-break feature that's still missing
is the ability to check individual email accounts separately. I have
some 25 accounts configured in Eudora 6.2.4, which is what I'm still
using in OS X 10.5.5 "Leopard" as my workhorse email client. It's
simply impractical to do mass checks, especially over my bog-slow
dialup connection, so that one is a deal-breaker until individual
checks are supported.
Another lingering problem is that Odysseus still can't
send mail through my ISP's (Sympatico Canada) SMTP server. This is
partly a Sympatico problem, and it afflicts Eudora as well.
The progress bar enhancements are appreciated and are
closer to being comparable with Eudora's excellent Tasks window,
although not quite there yet. But I haven't found any way in the
Odysseus Preferences to make message windows display the data strings
at the top, which I want.
Soooo, it's still Eudora for me. I may check out the
Thunderbird 3 beta, but not with any lively hope. Eudora works in
Leopard, although it's slow and not the rock of stability it was under
previous OS X versions. No email client has a search engine that
holds a candle to Eudora's.
You've listed a nice summary of Eudora's manifold
superiorities, which is why I keep using it despite the angularities
under Leopard. I'm hopeful for the future of Odysseus, but it may take
a while. I'll be delighted if the next release turns out to be usable,
but I'll be surprised if it happens that quickly.
I would suggest trying Eudora 6.2.4 again. What I've
done as a partial workaround is switching to Gmail Webmail with a
browser for some of my email traffic. It can still be configured to
work with Eudora as well, and thanks to them being SSL I think, my
ISP's port 25 block to prevent sending email with SMTP servers other
than their own doesn't work with Gmail, although the Gmail server works
awfully slowly with Leopard.
Charles
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