Is there an automatic setting for power on the 12" PB in Tiger? You seem more concerned with the fan noise than CPU slowness. Why do you even need to use LaTex?
I used to use that in grad school and with Word nowdays you dont need it. I wrote my engineering thesis in Word and it was fine. That was in 2000 when Latex was more popular in academia as Unix was more widespread. Now Dell has taken over Sun sparc machines. If you need to view lots of ps files, then you should dump your postscript files to a folder and run a automator script via new Tiger feature Automator.. do the ps2pdf

I am thinking that it would have been better for you to buy a 14" iBook as it is lighter and sounds like you want a larger screen. Maybe you could try Corel Photo for your file conversion needs. We are using that here at work in production.

I have a slower 1 GHZ 15" PB and have never seen any crashes in Tiger even running the unreleased 10.4.2 builds etc.. (I'm a ADC developer) You need to your Tiger disc in and reboot, hold down 'c' while rebooting and from the menu run the disk utility to repair permissions and check your disc.

run these commands in terminal to clean your cache out.. That might help with some of your problems regarding crashing..


sudo periodic weekly
sudo periodic daily
sudo periodic monthly


Let me know if you want to trade laptops..

Can I ask why you use Finder Copy (which seems to be a major source of your complaints)?

Are you duplicating a file? Why not Command-D and avoid the paste step?

Are you duplicating a file and then moving it to a new location? If so, why bother navigating to the spot and then pasting? Use spring-loaded folders.

Are you adding a file to an email? Drag and drop is oh-so-easy and faster. You can even drag files into Expose.

I honestly can't see why you'd ever want to Finder copy (I even forgot it existed), but then I guess it still should work properly if it is there.

Also, your system should be stable. You say you've had 1-2 OS crashes in a few weeks. That is simply NOT NORMAL. You have a hardware issue, serious install problem and/or hack.

P.S......

KEYNOTE. I forgot about that.

Something is VERY WRONG with your system if Keynote takes 45 seconds to save a 60 MB file. I have dozens of Keynote presentations over 75 MB and containing 70+ slides, with high-res pics, movies, the whole bit.

I just opened a 77.3 MB file...took about 12 seconds on a "cold" start (first time Keynote has been launched for weeks), with 8 other Apps running, on a lowly 1 Ghz TiBook 1Gig RAM 4200 RPM HD.

I modified the file and saved it...took maybe 2 or 3 seconds to save.

When I make presentations, command-s saves the file and I do it all the time as I modify the presentation...saves are always virtually instantaneous and better than "automatic" saves since mine are sure to caputre the relevant changes.

Personally, I find Keynote to be vastly superior to any version of Powerpoint I've ever seen, not only in display quality of text/images (the rendering is just much better than Windows/Mac PPT), but in preparation ease, export to PDF etc.

It pisses me off when people assume that everybody is prepared to either spend $450 on software they need maybe 15% of of the functionality from (once you figure in Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage) or become a criminal.

And as for "Word nowadays": The last really *good* version of Microsoft Word was 5.1. And that was in, what, 1992?

It was on the border of trying to do too much and not doing any of it really well. Word 6 was an atrocity, and every subsequent version has suffered from feature bloat that made even the things it historically did very well far less effective due to the overall slothfulness of the application. And even Word 5.1 had a bunch of annoying "non-standard" implementations and UI hiccups.

btw, some interesting background on why Word 6.0 was such shite (though it seems to me that the developer whose blog that is *still* doesn't really get why everybody hated it)

My first experiences with OS X weren't the best (these were back in the 10.0 days). It is very different from even OS 9, so I can only guess what it feels like coming from the Windows world.

I've always been a Mac users and recently started a job where I use a Windows/Dell configuration. It's a nightmare.

If you only need Word, buy Word. It's $239 new and 1/2 that for the upgrade. If you don't need word, don't buy it. The current version of Word works very well on my Mac. It's a little slow at times, but it works without any issues [sure I have a crash from time to time, but no more than most programs].

I think Word is great. I use some of those things that you may never use [track changes, notes, etc. etc.] What isn't valuable to you may be the make it or break it item for me.

Right on.

You may note that I was responding to the suggestion to use Word instead of LaTeX.

$240 may be peanuts to you.

you poor soul. . .not that i am one to speak as I have to use windows/hp/compaq at work and have to work with troubleshooting windows when it doesn't work/play well with the product i support.

good luck on getting used to the 'doze/dell config!



but it does help you remember why you use a mac. i grew up using a mac at home and windows at school from HS on (had apple or mac prior to that). i can use both, but the mac just makes sense and i can find what i want when i need it. it just works.

I have to second much of the original posters opinions of the 12" PB and OSX. I also must give him a little bit of support here. Though, I don't agree with everything said.

I bought my 12" rev D in February, just after the line was refreshed (1.5GHz/512MB/Superdrive)... I went from a 1.6GHz P4 running Windows XP to my new Mac. I've been plagued by the loud fan, noisy HD and low quality screen (REALLY noticable next to even a cheap Dell laptop). The biggest problem is the dim screen with a very narrow viewing angle. Try having a friend watch a DVD with you sometime... impossible. Only one person can get their head "just right" to see the image with accurate colors and even brightness (and then only at night!).

I have encountered seveal annoying bugs in OSX... It isn't nearly as stable as my old XP system (my opinion)... I've had two major system lock ups... one incident of the keyboard being remapped to garbage and nonsense (freaked me out!). The finder has crashed several times and I've had to force quit just about every application I use regularly at least once... some things like quick time and my video player (VLC) require force quits several times a week. Don't even get me started about the beach ball. What am I doing you ask? Downloading and watching a lot of divX files of TV shows. Windows never gave me any problems playing even the lattest compression formats or very large files. But it seems OSX is behind in video playback of various codecs; there are many files I download that simply aren't playable on the Mac (yes, I have DivX, DivX doctor II, Mplayer OSX, Windows Media player, VLC, etc...). Also, the files take MUCH longer to open on my Mac than a corresponding file on my PC.. this is true of all media, types from .mp3s to photos to videos. Granted, with iTunes, the .mp3 opening time is moot once you have the file imported into the library. Also, not having good .ogg support really pissed me off initially. All media files openend nearly instentaneously on my PC... I got used to it. Now with the Mac, I must learn patience.

Applications take eons to load compared to what I was used to on XP. I don't know if it's the Intel App accelerator, Windows XP's precaching routines or what... but Opera, and Internet Explorer just launced like lightning... we're talking a small fraction of a second. Opera takes eight to ten seconds to load on OSX. Safari has come a long way with the update to Tiger, a vast improvement in both usability and robustness (less crashing).

When opening Office documents on a PC, from a cold start with no prior use of Office, if I click on an Excel or Word file, it's open before I can say "Bill"... but on my Mac, with Office 2004, I have time to say "Bill Gates is an f***ing moron, why the heck do I have to sit here and wait all day for this..." and then it popps up. Even the smallest spreadsheet. So I get to curse at Bill more, which is an unexpected bonus to owning a Mac (I thought that routine was over when I switched).

I don't like some of the window management in OSX, the maximize window bevavior is not what I like. I find myself constantly resizing windows manually, even after resizing, not getting it right (especially when I go to click on the right scroll bar of an app and annoyingly the window behind it pops up). There should be a way to make the app exactly fill the screen... The task switching is problematic. I love the feel of expose, but it's minimally productive with many open windows (more than ten) due to the limits of the screen and the fact that it doesn't consistently place applications... each time I use it, I must hunt for the window I was looking for... and if there are multiple instances of spreadsheets that look similar, it can be confusing. So I use the "Window" file menu often.

MS Office 2004 on OSX is SLOW AS SNOT compared to Office XP. My god, it takes ten plus seconds to do a cut or copy and paste operation in some instances -- of half a line of text! I know the hardware isn't THAT slow... come on guys.

I had many problems copying my files over to the Mac from the XP box using a firewire drive. I have a lot of French language files with accent marks in them... many times I'd get beach-balled, or have the copy operation halted at an unknown place in the job. If windows has a problem with a large batch copy, it gives you useful options and lets you know exactly which file had the problem. To clarify, this isn't copy and paste... this is moving (drag-and-drop) a large directory from an external drive to the Mac HD using the finder. It was a nightmare. I even tried using the terminal with mv and had problems. (this was on 10.3.7). I did a few hours searching tech forums and couldn't find similar problems... I assumed OSX had better file name suppor than XP, but I guess not. My solution was to burn about 8GB of the PC's directory structure that contained the long filenames with accent marks to DVDs, for some reason the finder then copied them correctly. I forgot the details of the situation because it was in February and I was impatient to use my Mac for a road trip at the time. But it really soured me to my initial use of OSX (at least on my own personal machine - I've used Macs since the Mac II at work/school). It could have been the NTFS partition on the drive and the translation to OSX's filesystem that caused the agrivating problem.

Further my opinion is that the 1.5GHz G4 is no match for my three year old 1.6Ghz desktop PC. But OSX isn't nearly as responsive as Windows XP (ie, the snappy), so it may not really be the hardware... but Tiger was a good step in the right direction; a noticable improvement. Unfortunately, with Tiger, my fan seems to come on even more often... with only Safari running too! I like to leave BitTorrent running all night (and just BitTorrent, not a widget more)... and the fan is too annoying to have in my room with me. My old desktop PC was silent (I installed large Zalman heatsinks on the CPU, chipset and video card with only one large, low rpm fan for the whole system), but this Mac laptop is really loud.

Unlike the Original Poster above, I wouldn't consider switching back. I wish the 12" PB had a better video card (cooler), faster CPU, longer battery life and most importantly a better screen (the size is fine)... oh and a little thinner and lighter. I think with the switch to Intel and a little aggresiveness on Apple's part, we will see those things soon. At least compete with Sony Vaio. The GPU and CPU in the current Powerbooks are temperature elevating power hogs.

I like OSX overall... even though I think M$ is way ahead in a few key areas, probably just due to their large tech-savvy user base constantly tweaking support for various things. I do like the concept of Expose, and when I find myself on a PC, I wish it were there. Spotlight is wonderful. The Dashboard is a neat concept. I will stick with Apple for quite awhile and look forward to comming innovation. But I don't think it's a magic solution "years ahead of Windows" (maybe in some areas). For the most part it works well and looks a lot cleaner. I've been a UNIX user since the 80's and what sold me was installing X11 and running shell scripts. I dual booted Linux on my PC, but now with the Mac, I feel I don't need two OSes.

Not having to scan my system for virii and constantly remove spyware is a wonderful bonus. On that alone, I would reccommend a Mac to any of my non-gamer friends and relatives over a PC.

Mac pluses:
Expose, dashboard, spotlight
No virus scourges, no spyware (yet!)
Intelligently designed and well thought out interface
Clean, crisp interface (appearance)
iLife (especially iTunes and iMovie, very nice apps)
The PB keyboard is the best I've used on a laptop (kudos!)
I love the hinge style and speaker placement
The speakers are actually usable... though I keep my Grado's near by when I'm traveling Nice sound for a laptop!
The PB sleeps and wakes up better/faster than any other laptop I've used!

Mac minuses:
MS Office 2004 sucks compared to Office Windows
Buggy OS (maybe less so than windows for most, but not for me)
Hardware is a ways behind the PeeCee word (couple of years from my point of view)
The Snappy... come on, use a PC, you will see. They are VERY responsive to the user... making me always impatient at my Mac
my PC felt like drive a Porsche, while the Mac feels like driving a Greyhound bus! (okay, maybe not that bad)

If anyone has suggestions on how to improve my Mac experience, let me know. Don't get me wrong, I don't "hate" my Mac... I actually love the thing, and if you stole it, I'd have to kill you. I've never had an emotional attachment to any of my PCs before (well, maybe to my original 8086 and my 486). So Apple is doing something right. But I do reserve the right to be ciritcal. I am even more critical of Windows, believe it or not... even though I think XP is very stable and robust (with a few dozen caveats .

Right now I'm waiting for a 1GB SODIMM (Patriot, known Mac friendly)... and I plan to buy an external firewire drive, as I've filled up my 80gb HD and have a stack of DVDs in addition. When I do that, I'll format and install 10.4.1 (hopefully .2 by then)... this could solve some of my problems... as I'm still using the factory install of 10.3.7... updated to 10.3.8... then to Tiger. Something I'd NEVER do on a PC and would expect problems with (factory installs). But I was too impatient to do a clean install and started using my Mac on day one... everything is backed up on DVD, but I really don't want to go through a reinstall at the moment.

Thanks for the read... please don't flame... but you can criticise my usage habits and give feedback/tips/pointers all you like. I very well admit, perhaps I'm too used to the "Windows way" of doing things (like the OriginalPoster) and haven't fully delved into Apple's concepts.

If you can't play it on Quicktime, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player or Mplayer, what the heck kinda codec is it??? Whoever used it to encode content in the first place is either clinging to ancient things they love, purposefully trying to limit distribution, or is just plain clueless about what they are doing.


Um, don't forget that Windows has NONE of the graphics sophistication that Mac OS X has.

Everything you see on your mac is composited using the PDF model. Just look at how things are rendered on your mac in comparison to your PC...menus, textures, etc.

The LACK of this sophistication on your PC is what makes it seem fast. It's not doing anything! It's like trying to measure your speed by the tachometer! Sure widows revs along...but it's still in 2nd gear!

With Longhorn MS is going to attempt to bring Windows up to the level of the mac and I can PROMISE you that your Windows machine will run much, much, much slower once this happens.

You could argue that Apple shouldn't try to make a sophisticated OS, but that's pretty silly. OS X is still very much a forward-looking OS. Apple is building software for the future and the hardware will continue to rise to the performance challenges that come with this strategy. This was no small part of the shift to Intel.


Such as? I honestly can't think of any once you take the above into consideration.

This guy is about as smart as Paul Thurrott. He probably thinks because he could get a celeron with "more giga hurts" the mac stuff is eons behind in hardware terms.

Why are you blaming apple for MS' apps sucking on the mac platform anyway?

I recently bought a 12" Pb. It does everything I expect of it since it's not one of the higher end 15" or 17" Pb's. From reading the first part of your review:



It sounds like you were already expecting a let down with your puchase. You mention the superiority of a current line of PC laptops, while at the same time briefly noting the shortcomings of the Pb compared to the PC laptops. If you already think the Pb hardware is inferior to the offerings of PC laptops, how is an OS running this "inferior" hardware gonna make up for anything? I don't understand why you'd buy something you youself called "not very competitive to PC offerings." If price wasn't a factor like you stated, why didn't you shell out for the better equipment in your eyes? I've never seen anyone buy something they didn't consider good to begin with. Just doesn't make sense to me.

Just my .02

I don't think I can agree w/ everything wizzbang has said, but I must defend XP's stability compared to OS X. I use XP every day at work on two different computers, manipulating large databases and lots of printing, etc., and I have been impressed as to how stable it is. OS X (running Tiger and Panther), on the other hand, dishes out mytifying beachballs and random application freezes quite often.

But XP is not really as fast as OS X. If you have lots of files in a given directory, XP will take FOREVER to refresh the window, etc., whereas OS X seems to handle that better. I suppose each OS has its strengths in terms of speed, but OS X feel "snappier" to me. After decades using PCs (pre-windows on), I must say that I'm quite happy with OS X.

Cambro said



I think your defense of OS X by making such remarks is not constructive. There are different codecs out there, and it is the user's prerrogative to try to have proper support for his preferred codecs..."think different", remember? I thought the whole of point of OS X was to provide an alternative plataform to do things. Unfortunately, due to Windows's much larger installed base, you end up finding more variety in problem-solving there than in OS X.



Well, I guess that is one way to defend OS X, but if the end result in terms of user experience, which mac prizes so much, is that OS X feels slower than XP, then the goal has failed. Just having better technology doesn't make a good argument (such as "don't stab me w/ your prehistoric spear while I recharge my atomic death-ray"). Again, I don't really agree that XP is necessarily faster than OS X, but if wizzbang's experience is as such (and I take it at his word that what he is describing is true), then he has grounds to complain. Again, I think it is due to OS X's more advanced graphics engine on the OS side that we have such incredible things as expose and the way the widgets appear and disappear, but then again, you lose some of the "oooh, wow" effect when after the widgets magically appear in your screen via a cool fade effect, they hang there for seconds waiting to refresh data (even the darned clocks!). If there are knowledgeable OS X users out there that have recommendations to address wizzbang's and tie's experiences, I'm sure we would all appreciate it.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, and I hardly believe that any product can be perfect, and perfectly satisfy every customer. I'm sure that there are things that every mac, windows, linux, whatever user absolutely loves about their OS, but that there are also lots of stuff they can't stand. If on the balance, you like more things than you hate, and the things you dislike don't kill useability, then you stick w/ it. I find OS X a much better designed product than XP.

One last thing, I must echo Link's question, in that performance of MS products on the mac are not necessarily the best measurement tool for XP-to-OS X comparos. MS does have a huge vested interest in the success of Windows, so MS will spend considerable effort to optimize Office to run as well as possible under Windows. MS engineers might not have the same incentive when it comes to the OS X version.

Oh my G_d! I have never seen such a thread in my life. I usually like to sit back and read these things, but this is ridiculous. Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch. I've never seen so much complaining. To the original poster, wizzbang, and others complaining about OS X stability: the problems you describe are not normal or typical. There is either something wrong with your hardware or your OS and apps installations. And there is no indication that you have gone through any of the standard troubleshooting that has been discussed many times here (set up test user account, reset PRAM, reset PMU, start up in single user mode, etc.). As for apps, especially Microsoft apps taking 2 seconds longer to open on the Mac than on the PC, is this really the end of the world? As for anybody who has complained and has only 512 MB in their machine, go to http://www.dealram.com, max out your machine, and then come back to the forum. We'll wait for you. RAM requirements are only going to get bigger in the future so no more complaining about running with anything <= 512 MB. I'm sorry. I just can't sit back anymore!

Steve

ibook_steve: my 1GB SODIMM is on the way hopefully as of tomorrow, I'll be at 1.25GB... if this reduces page outs and general HD access, perhaps it will help some of my speed issues.

As to the other comments. Please don't be hostile. I'm half defending the original poster, half venting my frustrations about OS X/Apple. Just because you don't agree with some of the things I've said, doesn't mean we should be antagonistic.

I agree that OSX has more advanced GUI driving technology (than XP). I also think one of the areas MS is ahead of the game is with their driver support model... perhaps it's unfrair to credit MS, but rather the enormous army of developers and hardware vendors who invest HUGE resources into optimising, for instance, Nvidia graphics drivers, Intel chipset drivers, etc... all of these things make a huge performance difference.

For those of you who think my gripes about the G4 vs Intel cpus are just due to my lack of knowledge and belief in the marketing hype and MHz myth... think again... go visit anandtech.com and do some reading... intel has the PowerPC licked, IMHO. Look at the performance/power/future scalibility of just the Pentium M (ignore the celerons, everyone I know does). Heck, even Steve Jobs finally realized this. Don't get me wrong, the Power architecture is BETTER, hands down, in terms of it's overall design... as someone who has done a fair amount of x86 assembly can attest to. But Intel has the Mojo and the desire to improve and innovate, whereas IBM seems to conentrate it's efforts in non-desktop areas of interest.

I'm having a lot of fun learning about OS X... I love having darwiin under the hood. I like a lot. But there is a lot that needs to be improved.

As to the video codecs.. if I could open the darn file, I'd tell you the codec ... suffice it to say that people who encode and save .avi files for distribution via bittorrent/gnutella/limewire use the latest and greatest.... I think OSX, due to it's limited user base, is always a few months behind in this area. There are many codecs... and you can easily download packages that cover them all for Windows XP. Apparantely I can't get up to date ones for the Mac (or I jsut don't know how --- if you can educate me, please you will earn my respect).

I know about repairing permissions and some of the other things mentioned. I haven't tried every single one, but I will; thank you for the advice. As I said, one pice of advice I should take is a clean install. Some day I'll get round to it... oh and the first thing I did to my PowerBook after playing around, was to boot with the Apple DVD and run the diagnostics. All passed. My ram is OK. The only problems I belive I've experienced that aren't referred to on other forums are: the weird keyboard remapping prblem (maybe due to overheating???) and the strange long file name with accent marks not copying problem. But it seems to me, many of my gripes are echoed by others. Perhaps I have a defective machine. Or perhaps those of you who do not experience these issues simply do things the Apple way, never stress your system to the point where they would arise or simply don't pay attention. There are a whole litany of MS bugs I could go into... windows users LOVE pointing them out... if you go to TechNet on MS's site you can read all about them. Other than developers, OS X users tend to stick their fingers in their ears and hum real loud rather than accept the possibility of a problem with their holy grail. Sorry fo that criticism, but I call 'em as I see 'em.

Keep up the good work Apple! You make great products and I look forward to every improvement.

Thanks for the honest review. I've been using macs since the mac plus and my last mac was the PB G3 (Lombard). To my surpirse, I ended up buying a Fujitsu 5010D in 2003 when I was shopping around for something light and portable that I could take for travel/business. I really wanted to get the PB 12" at the time but the Fujitsu was almost 1lb lighter (3.5lbs vs 4.4lbs), had a smaller screen but higher resolution (10.9" 1280x768 vs 12" 1024x768), longer battery life (12 hrs with dual battery in place of DVD drive vs 5 hrs), smaller physical size for airplanes, and excellent durability/build quality (made in japan vs taiwan and the dealer I bought from had a zero dead pixel policy.) And from your review, the Fujitsu is a lot quieter also. I can't hear that it's operating and the fan rarely comes on.

Although I have been extremely happy with my Fujitsu I'm still a huge Apple fan at heart. My Fujitsu is 2.5 years old now and I've been recently browsing around for an upgrade -- something full featured AND ultraportable. Been looking at the powerbook line but I'm still disappointed by Apple's offerings.

I'm glad Apple's switching over to Intel hardware and taking advantage of their tech advances in laptops because, for mobile professionals, it's tough for a PB 12" to compete with something like the Panasonic W4 -- 12" lcd, 2.7 lbs, 8 hr battery and a built-in dvd burner. Hopefully Apple will have something similar next year hardware wise running OS X.

Cough, VLC, cough, www.vodeolan.org, cough. Works for me with those files!

I needed to use Finder Copy originally to copy files from an older Mac (using Appletalk). I still use it to copy files to/from my digital camera, USB flash device, etc. But now I know only to copy one group of items at a time, and am not having any problems any more. I think maybe you misunderstand what I mean by copy — it's just dragging from one volume to another, or dragging with command or one of those keys pressed.

Since your experience with Keynote is so different, I opened it up again, and it indeed saved very quickly. It isn't the exact same presentation as before, since I've changed things around a lot; I'm not sure what was going on. I had really wanted Keynote to work, since I agree the rendering is very nice. Powerpoint can also export to pdf by printing to a file, but I agree also that Keynote does it better.

Thanks for the tip, CincyGamer on sudo periodic maintenance. Don't get me started on LaTeX versus Word — in any case, nearly everybody in my community uses LaTeX and so do I. I'd be a fool to lock up my work in a proprietary format that even Microsoft can't always open correctly.

Fujitsu computers are very difficult to get in the US. I ordered from PortableOne and contacted Fujitsu directly, but both orders were going to take several weeks, so I cancelled them.

To everyone saying my experiences aren't representative or are caused by hardware faults, I think I disagree. The physical aspects of the computer are indisputable. The screen is quite poor, the computer is heavy, it doesn't have video out (requiring a dongle), etc. The software problems mostly seem like bugs and poor coding. Not all can be blamed on Apple (although Apple's constant transitions, including this next one to Intel, can't help). And some are just as bad on Windows -- Photoshop stability isn't perfect on either platform, and I have seen the Windows Finder equivalent crash. But for example, icon placement has been broken since X pb and is still not entirely working. For example, I try to set .tex files to be opened by anything but Script Editor and X automatically switches them back to Script Editor. I'm sure there are similar bugs in Windows, but I haven't encountered them in my work. The Airport menu is ridiculously inaccurate and unresponsive, comparable to Windows XP before the service packs. Resetting the PRAM isn't going to change this.

Anyway, I love working on OS X. The computer is usually fast enough, only slow for editing my digital camera images (Photoshop is fast, GraphicConverter is slow, I really miss Picasa).

I still think you have either an OS or a hardware issue. I have the 15" PB and the thing just runs and runs and runs. Bought it the day Tiger came out and it's been running perfect ever since. Uptime of 35 days that was shattered when I did updates.

I leave Mail, Word, Enterouge, PSE 3.0, Safari, FireFox, and a bunch others open all the time and they go for weeks without crashing or quitting. I can't remember the last time the Finder died. It's supposed to be this way.

I'd try a fresh install of the OS and see if that helps. Or have the machine checked by Apple. This is not how a Mac should behave!

Hi everyone!

Just a followup... Thanks for sticking with this thread to those who can't stand our bitching

I've been running 1.25GB ram for over a week now. Before I installed, I ran the complete set of diagnostics found on the Mac install DVD. Then I installed my new 1GB SODIMM and ran them twice. No problems found. I could loop it overnight to be sure... but I'm always downloading stuff. So I doubt any of my experiences are due to faulty hardware.

Ok, the 1GB upgrade was nice... but not nearly as good as I had hoped. It helps when many apps are open, but only to a certain point. For most things, I notice no improvement whatsoever. For instance, after booting this morning, doing normal morning stuff, going to work, then coming home and doing normal evening stuff (ie web browsing, e-mail, MS Office, BitTorrent, Cabos, VLC, Quicktime)... Activity monitor reports that only 14MB of my 1280MB are free, but 803MB is "inactive" There are currently 46730/3364 Page Ins/Outs. My fan is spinning like a jet engine and the biggest CPU hog is Safari at 16%. I'm running iTunes, two widgets in Dashboard, one instance each of Cabos and BitTorrent (downloading one file each), Temperature monitor, Activity monitor and that's it! Running 54.8C on the graphics chip, 53.0C on the proc.

In the last week I've only had video related Force-Quit issues with QuickTime, VLC and Mplayer OSX; nothing else has crashed (yet). I did experience a wierd glich when trying to run software update, the menubar text overwrote the Finder menu text from the apple icon all the way over... it was real ugly. When I swiched away from Software Update, the GUI refreshed that part of the screen and cleaned it up. I hope not to see that again.

I tried to install Homeworld 2... it ran like snot running down a mirror and sent my graphics temp up to 69C in a hurry. Yikes! This is an old game that runs good on a 1GHz Pentium (though probably with a better video card than the Go5200). Dissapointing... but I was mainly curious and didn't expect much. I'll have to go dig my PC out of storage if I want to do anymore gaming.

Oh, and to the comment about me not bothering anyone about my slow Mac experiences until I've maxed out the RAM. If you are reviewing a 12" PowerBook, why not review the stock config from Apple?

As to MS Office 2004 being an unfair comparison of the Mac and PC... Office is a staple application... it really defines what many (not all) people want to do on their computer. If you simply write it off, you are telling users "don't buy a Mac to run Office," which I think is silly. Therefore, I think it is quite valid and pertinant to compare Office on the Mac and PC. PC wins hands down. This may not be a fair representation of the Mac's capabilities, but it is as real world as you can get.

Some positives I forgot to mention. Most of my PC friends yawn when I show them my PowerBook and OSX. However, one thing that runs very well on OSX and gets "wow" responses from the PC crowd is iMovie. It is very easy to use, well thought out and responsive; it applies transitions and effects extremely quickly. iMovie hands down blows away anything on Windows in the same price catagory. I was using ULead on the PC and love iMovie... if I had to go back to video editing (home videos from a miniDV, nothing fancy) on my PC, I'd REALLY miss iMovie.

Like I said, I like OSX and recommend Macs to most people now... but I will continute to complain and be realistic. I miss my PC for a lot of reasons... but the only two I can think of that make me want to setup my old machine are: MythTV on Linux and video games on XP. I also would like to hack into my neighbors WiFi just for kicks... (128wep)... KisMac can do it, but unfortunately Apple's Airport Extreme cards won't work with it in passive mode (necessary to sniff packets) :0 Wish I still had my Linux setup Muhahaha.... So I guess that's three reasons.

Take care and keep an open mind. I love my Mac and enjoy reading the posts on this forum. Please don't hate (or flame) me for my opinions.