My first week with the Mac.....

I thought I'd note down a few observations about the new laptop. I fully intend to use it in both Windows and OS-X modes and so far have been (mostly) pleased!

• The keyboard looks very tacky but is in fact a joy to type on - much better than my old Dell.
  
• Battery life is fine - under OS-X (with the proper power-management drivers) I get four hours of general stuff done, under Windows it's less - maybe two and a half.
• Display - best image I've ever seen on a laptop, no question.
• Weight - fine, a bit lighter than the Dell.
• All of the built in gadgets (webcam, IR remote, audio etc.) work fine under OS-X but under Windows it's a bit of a different story. The webcam is absent and the audio is kinda incomplete. See this thread on Apple.com - basically you get audio out of the built-in speaker and out of the headset jack, but plugging in your earbuds doesn't mute the speaker! The microphone doesn't work and plugging in a mic isn't there either. I suppose BootCamp is still very Beta, but they need to roll up some drivers for the gadgets to work under Windows. Actually you can make the audio to work - it involves lots of messing around with different versions of OEM drivers. I did it and eventually got it all as it should be but it left things a bit unstable with spurious error messages on boot-up. Your mileage may vary - see here. Because I Skype a lot I got one of these which works fine under Windows (and you can leave the music/radio-stream playing while you chat!).

So after a few days of fiddling around with audio drivers I also realised that my NTFS formatted Windows partition was on read-only in Mac land. My Mac HFS+ partition was invisible to Windows and so transfering files between OSes had to be done via a thumb-drive! So, I took the decision to repave the Windows partition. One thing I wished I'd realised was that it is ONLY BootCamp that can write a new master boot loader on the Windows partition. The procedure is to boot to OS-X and let BootCamp re-claim the space, re-partition and then let the system re-boot with the XP+SP2 CD in the drive. It took me a few times around the cycle (assuming I had a corrupt XP CD!) before it dawned on me.
So now I have a FAT32 Windows partition so I can read/write Excel files (for example) in both Mac & Windows.

A few things that make it easier;

• KeyTweak allows you to re-map the break key on, say, the F12 key. Means you can do ctrl-alt-del when you need to!
• MacBook13keyboard.zip is a Windows keyboard definition I brewed (I've rolled it with an MSI installer so you can put it on your machine easily). Out of the box Windows installs with a standard US keyboard which is fine bar the pound symbol (shift-3) which shows as a hash and it also has sticky-quotes, which I hate. My keyboard definition sorts both of those.
• iMouse solves the single-button track-pad dilema - very good, although apparently these Macs actually have a rocker (it feeds like it has a left and right click) which will be livened up some time soon.
  
• There is USB imaging device that although recognised isn't available under Windows - not a big deal but whenever software tries to touch it the machine blue-screens!
  I can only assume it's the built-in camera. When I let Skype try and pick it up the machine bombed spectacularly and if you leave Skype with video enabled it bombs on every re-boot! It's best to disable it from the device manager, perhaps BootCamp v.2 will have it working!
  

Now I'm no Mac fan-boy but I do like this machine - runs Windows well (about twice as quick at encoding DivX video than my 2.0Ghz Dell - the dual-core is a real step forward). Since we install so many machines running Final Cut and XSAN I really need to be on top of OS-X and this is a great way to immerse myself in it.
Finally - I was in the Apple Store here in London picking up a spare power-supply. The young chap who helped me was very good - I wish all retail outlets were that agreeable. Anyway - he was asking me what model I had etc. and when I mentioned it was my first Mac he stopped, touched me on the arm and said (in a very ernest tone);

Can I tell you, the feeling of excitement never quite goes away,

Dude, it's only a computer!

No, it's not only a computer.

I didn't have the heart to tell him that the first I did was install Windows, and Linux ain't far behind!