Monthly Archive for February, 2008

MacBook Take Too

Published on 29 February, 2008 in Life and Technology. 0 Comments

As you can see below I had bought a Black MacBook.

I absolutely love it both visually and performance wise, OS X is better than Windows, sorry but it is. On Thursday I booted up like normal and noticed that I had not been connected to my wireless network and that the AirPort has been switched off, I know I didn’t do this but didn’t think much of it and attempted to turn it back on, when I tried this is simply said AirPort unsupported and that it was “non-Apple shipped”, well as I had not mucked about with anything I thought a simple reboot would fix this but nope was the exact same, I then tried a reinstall of the OS but still the same error.

I took it back to Curry’s yesterday and they did not want anything to do with it and told me they had tested it with their wireless instore and it was working fine, I was shocked at this as I knew it did not work, when I phoned back to get more information I established they had actually used an ethernet connection which last time I checked was not wireless.

I was angry to say the least considering we had only bought the laptop on Friday last week and they had a 28 day “quibble free” return policy. They ended up saying that I was not getting a refund or replacement and that I would have to send it away to Apple for a repair which I thought was ridiculous considering the age of the product, I refused and said I was taking it home tgo give it another go, this all along was a lie, I simply went to another Currys store who looked at the product and issued a replacement straight away, simple. They went to get one for me and it turned out they had none left, only the new Penryn based MacBook’s which I did not fancy as the display model was absolutely roasting and appeared to have a noisy HDD, this was not doing anything so CPU usage was not to blame and as for the wear and tear of the hard disk this was not the case as it had only been out on display since Wednesday and this was only Thursday. The only place that had the old MacBook which actually has a bigger CPU L2 Cache was PC World in Glasgow. So had to reserve and travel all the way up there, once we get there it took ages for them to find it as at first they kept bringing out the new ones but we got their eventually, they all looked at me as if I was weird for wanting the older one but hey that’s life.

Got it home and it’s been working fine, upgraded the RAM to 4GB and it’s flying away, as for the new hotter model which has a measly .2Ghz upgrade that can stay in Currys heating up their display for all I care. That is all people, here is a nice screenshot of the latest specs of the MacBook and my big time cut down dock due to the screen size.

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New Laptop

Published on 25 February, 2008 in Life and Technology. 0 Comments

MacBook Top

I have been toying with the idea of getting a MacBook for ages and I finally bit the bullet and went for it, being the performance hunting person I am I could not settle for the base model so opted for the Black model, I kind of regret paying the extra £120 GBP just for a coat of paint but once opening it and looking at the sexy white Apple logo on the back of the laptop that lights up when the laptop is in use makes it worth it.

What exactly did I get for my money?

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz
1GB RAM
160GB 5400RPM HDD
Intel Integrated X3100 Graphics
DVD-RW Dual Layer SuperDrive
6 Hours Battery Life (Not quite this in real life but more or less 4 and a half hours which is pretty good.)

After spending a few days with the laptop I have to say that I am 100% happy that I have ditched my Windows Vista based HP Laptop as this is much better. For starters the thing looks sexier but I have to say, the HP is also a incredibly sexy machine as well with it’s “imprint” design. The specifications are better on the HP than they are on the HP yet the MacBook seems to run faster and get things done quicker, this is more than likely due to it’s operating system (Mac OS X 10.5.2 “Leopard) which I really like and have been using on my Mac Mini since it came out in October and really wanted it on a mobile level and nothing is lost in the shrinking down, all that is really changed is the size of the dock which is very restricted due to the size of the screen so had to a bit of prioritising.

Reviews I read on the internet stated the Black model was a fingerprint and grease magnet due to it’s matte finish but I have to say that I am having no problems with very little fingerprints on the casing, keys and trackpad, those that do make it on a quick run-over with a damp cloth gets rid of them instantly, and unlike the white one the black one is more resilient to scratches as the material is not shiny and have a high sheen gloss which makes the smallest of scratches look giant. The white backlit Apple on the top of the case looks very nice when the laptop is in use and even matches the brightness of you screen no matter what level you have it at.

The battery life is a major plus, Apple state six hours of battery life, I don’t know what they were doing but the best I can get is 4 and a half hours, this is with the brightness at medium, bluetooth and WiFi turned on and using it quite a bit for example browsing the web while listening to some songs on iTunes so not advanced stuff or anything but the battery life is great no or the less. The battery actually has a button on it that you can press while the laptop is off or even if the battery is removed and the onboard CPU (yes, the battery has it’s own processor built in) will tell you how much charge is help in the battery. Charging is easy with the MagSafe adaptor which is great and makes charging a breeze, you simply attach the magnet charger which if suddenly pulled will cleanly snap off and not damage either the MacBook or the charger. The LED’s on the MagSafe adaptor shows you charging status wither the computer is on or off, red for problems, amber for charging and green for charged.

The only problem I have had with the computer is that boot up can be a bit slow, this is due to the low amount of RAM which can also cause the beachball to spin when a couple of applications are opened, this has already been solved though as I have ordered 4GB RAM from Crucial and that should be arriving shortly, once that’s installed this machine is going to be one mean machine.

So if you are looking for a new laptop with a great weight, size and battery life look no further than the Apple MacBook no matter what model you go for you will be pleased (especially if the move is from a Windows laptop to an OS X laptop, believe me Vista is never going to get any better, give up while you can!).

MacBook, White or Black?

Published on 19 February, 2008 in Life and Technology. 2 Comments

Well I have been thinking of a MacBook for a while but I have decided to go ahead and get one in the coming months, I have a decision to make though and that is Black or White.

Initially I was was in love with the white one due to it being original and Apple like but after looking at some pictures on Flickr it became apparent there was a problem with the casing and lots of people had discolouration problems with the plastic. I would hate for this to happen, I know Apple are replacing the defective parts but there are reports of it reoccurring again and again and eventually their warranty runs out and they are left with a stained MacBook, this is a pretty large investment and I would be keeping it for more than a year so this is quite a big issue for me.

The SuperDrive is a must so it will be the top spec white one or the black one as they are the only ones that come with the SuperDrive. RAM is not an issue as I plan to upgrade to 2 or 4GB in the future. This laptop will have to run Windows XP under BootCamp as I have tools that run only on Windows and require this so the 160GB HDD on the Black model would be very handy.

As the white model is suffering discolouration the black is not without problems, it’s a finger print magnet which is not a big issue as I take good care of things and keep them clean but more concerningly is the fact that the textured finish wares off and leaves the keys and trackpad shiny, this cannot be solved and in my opinion takes the look off the laptop, this does not seem to happen with the white model and I do not know how much action they need to see before they become shiny.

So basically I am taking a chance with both as one suffers discolouration and the other ware marks, in my personal opinion both are sexy but the larger 160GB HDD would come in handy for BootCamp but it it worth the extra £120 GBP.

Comments are very welcome as I really don’t have a clue.

WordPress Updated

Published on 19 February, 2008 in Website. 0 Comments

After some delay due to some code not working correctly (the one that keeps my thumbnails manageable believe it or not), I have updated to the latest WordPress or version 2.3.3 for you technical people.

As usual things have been tested to make sure problems don’t occur but if you notice anything get in touch via the contact me button.

Prison Break, Linux, PS3 and More

Published on 12 February, 2008 in Life, School and Technology. 0 Comments

Sorry for the random title, just that I have just finished watching some episodes to catch up on my favourite TV show!

Been watching it since Season 1 and I have to say I am hooked, other people get pissed off because all they seem to do is go in and out of prisons but I think the script writers add enough twists to keep you entertained. For anyone looking for a great TV program that you can get hooked on I recommend this, if you live in the UK, Sky One and Sky One HD is currently airing Season 3 every Monday. They also shows repeats or have complete Prison Break days so there is usually a way to catch up.

Keeping on the entertainment side of things as you know I have installed an 80GB HDD in my PS3, this was a perfect opportunity to install Linux through the PS3’s other OS option. After some reading up I decided to go with PS3 Ubuntu, this seemed about the only distribution of Linux that didn’t require any hacking or extra boot-loaders etc to get running on the PS3. I downloaded the ISO and burned to CD-R. The next step was easy enough, you go to format disk on PS3 and allocate 10GB for another OS, then choose install another OS in the menu, it scans for the disk and once found gives you a list, if you don’t have anything else plugged in the disk will be the only option, simply choose this and it will install the boot-loader from the disk (this is the part that allows the rest of the Linux OS to be loaded).

Once that has completed choose for the console to start the OS instead of Sony’s OS when booting up and then reboot the PS3. If all has went well you will be presented with a Ubuntu screen that is similar to the one you would get if using the OS on a computer, simple press enter and then it begins to load the OS live from the CD. Once done you are presented with the Ubuntu desktop. Make sure you have your USB mouse and keyboard plugged in and double click on the Install icon on the desktop, this will install a copy of Linux to your PS3’s hard disk instead of running it off the CD. It will ask you some questions and for a user name and password. Once installed reboot your PS3 once more and you will be presented with a login screen, shove in the details that you gave during install and you should be the owner of a fully fledged Ubuntu installation on your PS3, you can now remove the CD as it’s not required.

The first thing I checked out was that everything was working and it looked good. Wireless, sound, USB, CD Drive, Ethernet, HDMI and Input Devices were all working correctly, the only thing giving me difficultly was the graphics chip, it just wouldn’t give me the resolution I was looking for and thus I always had black borders round my screen. There are guides out there to try and combat this but I didn’t have time as I was just mucking about so don’t really know if this can be solved for sure. Overall the performance was good, the CPU’s should up as 2 dual core 3.2Ghz IBM Cell processors which rattled through anything, letting it down most was the RAM as the PS3’s only has or only chooses to share 256MB which seriously deteriorates performance. Overall the system worked well and could be used as a desktop PC with some tweaking but I didn’t buy the PS3 for that so I uninstalled the OS and gave the HDD space back to the default Sony OS which I prefer and offers everything I need at the correct resolution.

As you may know I had Sky HD installed, unfortunately it has not been going well, at first I was impressed with the sexy look of the box and the great picture quality it offered but lately it has been chucking up errors you just don’t want from a £299 (GBP) box. At random periods the box displays a no satellite signal being received warning screen but I know this is not the case as I have 3 other boxes connected to the same satellite and they are all working correctly without any problems, the HD box has two inputs (one to watch current stuff and one to record things in the background). In the signal menu you can see the strength and quality, but in the past few days either one or both of the signal indicators have been showing not locked which means the satellite has lost the lock on the signal, this would usually suggest satellite fault but as mentioned above I know this is not the case and that the HD box or cabling to it must be faulty. I do a couple of resets etc and the problem does not get better so I phone Sky and explain what is happening and how the box is less than a fortnight old. They refuse to do anything and say that an engineer will have to come out and that will cost me £65 GBP, you can imagine my reaction to this so currently I have the box sitting there not working and Sky not wanting to do anything about it, needless to say I will continue contacting them until they give me some sensible options.

On the PC side of things, Windows Vista SP1 has been released, I downloaded it and slipstreamed it onto my Ultimate disk which was quite difficult since Microsoft decided that it wasn’t going to provide any easy options like it did with service packs for XP, once done it was rewarding as Vista is much more responsive and I have a disk that saves me the pain of having to install things after the main OS and stuff have installed which makes for a cleaner experience and a short install time.

On the other-hand OS X 10.5.2 has been released, I have downloaded this and applied to a fresh install of OS X 10.5 and it makes some welcome changes like being able to turn of extra graphics effects like transparency which people have complained about (personally doesn’t bother me) and some other things to do with stacks, there are not a lot of visible changes but Apple assures that they have made some good changes in the background code which is good.

I have not been able to use my Mac in a week since the keyboard broke (nope I do not have backups), I don’t know what happened to it but all of a sudden the 5 key broke and then followed by the V, after this every letter I pressed was V and whenever I pressed any keys the V stuck on and wouldn’t stop inputting V’s until I banged the keyboard lightly. I bought the keyboard online so would have to wait for a repair, this wasn’t an option so I decided to take it back to the Apple Retail store in Glasgow, this was fine and they tested the keyboard on their Mac Book Pro’s and found it to be faulty, it was replaced without any hassle and I am typing on it just now, god is it good to be back in the world of Macs! I also got to see the MacBook Air and god is it thin, the pictures don’t do it justice, it barely exists but I wouldn’t buy one for one reason, the black keyboard, whoever thought this would look good on a silver notebook should be shot!

Prelims for exams start Thursday so better get studying, will let you know how I get on!

Sorry for the long post but I haven’t blogged in a while due to the keyboard issues and school kind of taking priority but I will try and post more often, hopefully this uber long post will help you get up to speed if you can be bothered reading it!

PS3 80GB

Published on 3 February, 2008 in Life and Technology. 0 Comments

As you know I recently purchased a PS3 40GB, I don’t really use it for games. The main reason for purchasing was to play BluRay discs and to act as a central HD media hub on my network.

Everything works great but the hard disk was holding it back, my HD content comes to about 60Gb which was too big for the current HDD, so I took out the factory install 40GB disk and shoved in a 80GB that I had spare from a Mac Mini upgrade.

Before I done this I had backed up all my things using the built in PS3 backup utility to an external HDD, this took minutes and successfully transferred all my stuff over. When I booted up for the first time on the new HDD it said the new disk had to be formatted before use. I selected yes and a couple of minutes later I was back in the XMB, everything was gone and the menu was back to factory defaults.

I then plugged in the external HDD, went into the PS3 restore utility, selected the disks and then the system said it would format internal and then copy stuff and reboot to finish. All this was done in about 12 minutes and when the system booted back up it was like the HDD was never swapped, all my game demos, videos, music etc and even all my themes and wallpaper settings had been restored! The thing that impressed me most was my Folding@Home work unit had even been backed up.

Overall quite easy to upgrade, just a flap and 5 screws (1 to remove the caddy and 4 holding the disk in), once new disk had been fitted into caddy simply slide back into the PS3, secure with blue screw and reattach cover, the XMB interface will guide you through the rest of the steps to get your PS3 up and running again.

Happy February!

Published on 1 February, 2008 in Life, School and Technology. 0 Comments

Helllllo.

Sorry for not updating in a while, I have just found it difficult to fit in the time between working and going to school but here I am.

Not been up to much except from the above, mucking about with the new iPod Touch 1.1.3 firmware now it has been JailBroken but I am not too impressed to be honest and most of my applications don’t work yet under the new firmware so I had to downgrade back to 1.1.1 and start jailbraking and loading all my applications etc back on.

On other news Prison Break is back on Sky One HD, I have recorded last Monday’s which was S03E09 and this week it’s S03E10 problem is that I have only watched up to S03E02 so had to go HDBits and acquire the missing episodes which I have done, so will now need to fit in some time to view them.