Jumping Ship

So, my Fedex tracking number told me that I would get my new Macbook Pro today in the mail. Turns out Fedex was better than their word, and I received my bundle of laptop joy this past Friday. My original intent was to post as soon as I got it online, taking pictures of every step of the process and my first impressions. But the truth is, I’ve been using my new Macbook Pro so much that I really haven’t even had time to stop and post. Yea, it’s that great.

The first 72 hours I have used this laptop has altered the way I have thought of using a computer on a number of fronts. I’m just not used to something simply working perfectly the first time in OSX; from drivers, to apps, to custom settings and preferences. I felt that even though I considered myself an experienced user, I would still stumble when first learning the ins and outs of the mac GUI, but after taking the time to read the manuals, I was amazed at how fast I caught on.

I spent the first night after I got my laptop zeroing out the hard drive, in order to insure against future instability due to bad sectors on the drive. From there, it was all installations…Firefox, Thunderbird, VLC, the usual cross-platform suspects. But where OSX really shines is in its third-party development, and I hope to showcase a number of the apps that I have found to be the most useful and interesting in the coming weeks.

The arrival of my MBP was perfectly timed with a visit to one of my friend’s houses in Indianapolis. I figured the best way to truly test out my new system’s hardware capabilities would be with a good old-fashioned LAN. The 8600 GT card in this setup did not disappoint. We spent most of the time playing CnC3, which really puts a machine through its paces. When I played this game on my old desktop, I had to turn all of the settings down to as low as it would go, at 800×600 resolution; now I play it on ultra high at the native 1440×900, and it is simply amazing. And contrary to what most people have reported, it really didn’t heat up all that much, considering its small form factor.

Since I spent most of the weekend playing games, I also obviously installed Windows via Bootcamp. I wound up going with Vista Business addition thanks to the generous donation of a spare license by one of my good friends (thanks Matt!). I haven’t decided if I am going to stick with Vista, but if I change my mind, I have a copy of XP Pro to fall back on (thanks Drew…you guys and your crazy education discounts ;P).

On the whole, things went very smoothly in my first 72 hours; there were a few hiccups here and there: one crash out of a game, and some installation issues with some older games in Vista, but I couldn’t be happier with my purchase. I will try to keep a weekly log of all of my experiences with both Vista and OSX as I break this machine in (I just today migrated all of my files via Ethernet). I hope you are enjoying reading about my experience as much as I am actually living it! Cheers!